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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

Seems to me Netflix did just fine at ruining itself. How could Yahoo have done worse?

Well, Yahoo bought Tumblr only, er, 10 years ago. Netflix had some great years since then and and my suspicion would be that Yahoo wouldn't have provided the investment needed to not be completely crushed by the competition.

> Netflix did just fine at ruining itself

You're objectively incorrect in that opinion. They just reported 247M global paid memberships. Highest they've ever had.

Subjectively, their content selection sucks now, and it used to be pretty good.

I don’t think you can really blame Netflix for the change in content over time. In the beginning nobody understood how big streaming would be so Netflix could license whatever for cheap. They were successful and everybody said “oh shit we need to build our own streaming service” so now we have this nightmare land of needing a bunch of different services to watch what you want.

Objectively Netflix worth $191.24 Billion USD.

Objectively Yahoo is worth $27.32 Billion USD, 1/7th as much as Netflix.

netflix could, for instance, not be worth 10x what it was worth 10 years ago

Well that's true. I admit I didn't read the original article before posting and was thinking more of "Hm, I used to watch a lot of stuff on Netflix and now there just isn't anything that seems worth my time" as opposed to looking at the financial performance of those companies.

They IPO'd at around $1 and are now trading around $435. If that ruining yourself then most companies would be happy to ruin themselves in that way.

Netflix is still around 2/3's of its max valuation and has a PE ratio of over 40. It is doing just fine if you step outside of the HN bubble.

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