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Comment by MarioMan | Hacker News Reader

Several years ago, Paramount was handing out free monthly trial codes for Paramount Plus every month. Then, some time in 2020, they just ”forgot” to cut off my access after the trial ended. I had free Paramount Plus from then until 2025, when they merged with Skydance. The free subscription expired almost immediately after the merger was announced.

It’s evident to me now that they did this to boost their active subscriber numbers. I’m sure a lot of people didn’t even realize this had happened to their accounts. And those that had weren’t about to complain about it too loudly.

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Presumably whoever is doing the acquisition would look at the financial numbers in addition to the subscriber numbers? Then they'll notice a discrepancy between subscriber count and how much $ is coming in, which makes this whole thing unravel. It's far more likely it's just run of the mill incompetence and/or change of leadership prompting an "efficiency" drive.

The issue is that "whoever" isn't a single homogeneous entity. I would presume that someone in the organization spotted the discrepancy. Having worked closely with (and sometimes for) large corporations, I cannot presume that C-Suite decision makers were sufficiently aware of the issue. Or perhaps they didn't weigh the issue properly. Or maybe they were consumed by a desire to complete the merger, no matter what. There are quite a few ways this could have gone, internally, and still arrived at this place.

Anecdotally, I've worked at places where the due diligence process wasn't so much about determining if a course of action is good, but justifying a decision that was already made. If the subscriber count and income don't mesh, just use whichever number makes the merger look better.

You’d think, wouldn’t you? But there are so many promotions and discounts and bundles going on that it’s never a linear relationship. So no one would be able to easily tell the numbers were diverging for at least a few quarters. And as long as they are both headed up, no one actually cares anyway. But if you wanted to juice the growth rate or slow the churn rate just a bit to look better or hit some target that you were just shy of, it’d be easy enough to add a “bug” to forget to bill some certain percentage of trial accounts.

Or maybe they just suck at the coding that handles trial accounts. As rapidly as this stuff was rolled out, and as late as the decisions about actual promotions probably get made, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t buggy.

Yeah, there is no way to back out consumers vs. revenue at basically any big company. They all report "ARPU" or average revenue per user, because there is always a spectrum of pricing, almost never a single price. Between bundle pricing with partners, promo pricing offered for new customers, customers on old plans that haven't upgraded or updates, depending on the type of service and how they manage it there can be hundreds of price points in play for any given customer

That isn't to say there's no way to audit for this kind of situation, they could definitely report out what every single customer is paying and just find the ones that = zero

JPMorgan bought Frank in 2021 for $175M, and the companies databases where all very obviously procedurally generated.

With the idea being that, like as happened with Frank, multiple of the top-most members Paramount’s leadership will end up in jail for a number of years, at least once there is a neutral admin? It looks like each of Frank’s leaders were sentenced to about 7.5 years in prison each on the 175m deal - do sentence generally scale?

A popular MMORPG went through a period of not enforcing rampant botting, gold farming, and similar activities which provided a substantial boost to their user numbers. A short time after the acquisition, they announced major initiatives to combat botting, bringing the user count back down.

IANAL, but couldn't this be fraud?

It would depend on how they presented user numbers in the merger discussions I think basically. If they promised anything about how organic the users were or suggested they were well paying for revenue projection purposes?

RuneScape presumably?

Same as twitter.

> Then, some time in 2020, they just ”forgot” to cut off my access after the trial ended. I had free Paramount Plus from then until 2025, when they merged with Skydance.

Reminds me of that scene from Office Space:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUE0PPQI3is

Has anyone Loopt sama into this discussion?

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