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Comment by mitthrowaway2 | Hacker News Reader

I struggle to think of any manner in which Netflix can, today, be considered a 'tech' company. They originally were a DVD rental service, then they developed in-house a media-streaming service which briefly gave them a lead but soon became a commodity across the media industry, and now they compete with other media companies on the basis of their content library.

I'm sure they employ lots of software programmers, but so does Disney.

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It says it in the article: it's what their business model is like. Netflix pays a bunch of money in R&D and then has a low marginal cost for each additional customer, who are on a subscription (like so many SaaS businesses). Disney, if it was just Disney+, would probably be thought of as a tech company, but Disney is also all about their intellectual property and the ways to monetize that: movies, parks, and merch.

Disney's interesting because it's not just another media company, so what category does it fit in? Perhaps it's big enough that folks are just "Disney" analysts. Speaking of hydra, how do you analyze the stock prices for companies like Sony? They make movies, music, TVs, video games/consoles, cameras (high-end for professionals), phones, CMOS camera sensors, and probably others I'm not even aware of.

They pay tech company salaries? That's about it for why it's in FAANG.

"Tech company salaries" is itself kind of begging the question -- if a technology or software company pays a low salary, is it not a tech company? For that matter, I hear the salaries are pretty high at Goldman Sachs too.

When the term FAANG was coined, those 5 companies were paying engineers around double what they could ask for anywhere else. I believe that's when software engineers started grouping them together. It became a goal for many young engineers to join because of the fantastic salaries/benefits.

Things have changed since then but the point remains, FAANG generally means "large company that pays above market for software developers."

Netflix is a FAANG company because it's the 'N' in FAANG. It's just not a tech company.

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