How Will We Know If House of Cards Was a Hit?
vulture.com
vulture.com
The real question is why does anybody outside of Netflix need to know whether it's a hit or not?
> Remember, with a subscription costing about $100 a year, adding 10 million subscribers over the next few years would bring in an addition $1 billion to Netflix's coffers.
Am I missing something, or is this the most irrelevant sentence ever written in journalistic context? Genuine question. (Not to mention the fact that it seems to mix annual subscriptions to a one-off bank-balance boost?)
If they can prove it was a hit, that's good marketing material.
Sure, there's arguments for releasing it, but I don't see any arguments for that "but it's my right to know!" feeling.
If you're in the media journalism industry (as, say, a writer at Vulture), of course you want to know whether it's a hit or not. Ratings numbers are the perfect excuse to write weekly opinion pieces about how Netflix is doomed/thriving to drum up pageviews.
First, why does anyone need to know anything? There's a favorite passage of mine in Walden about news being gossip, and those that read it being women over their tea, which cuts to the trivial nature of most news, but Thoreau failed to recognize some things because his focus was on living his own life and not worrying about the lives of others. He had no use for the type of information he derides, but never acknowledged that others may have use for such information.
So, with that in mind, let's think about this from a few perspectives beyond our own myopia.
The audience. Audience can be broken down into various sub-groups, but I will focus on the likeliest readers of Vulture.
Media professionals may need to know this information because this information gives them greater insight into their own work. If Netflix produced and distributed a popular show in a novel way, I would very much like to know details like exactly how popular this show has been.
Media consumers may like to know this information as well. If a new show (let's call it Jumping Off A Bridge) airs and it is reported that 5 million people watched, perhaps the show is good. If 5 million people are watching Jumping Off A Bridge, perhaps I would enjoy Jumping Off A Bridge, too. Such is the world of entertainment news, which is most definitely not hard news, but clearly has an audience.
(Let's also not forget that audience is what advertisers want.)
Which gets me to why journalists would need this information. There is a particular news value called magnitude. If something affects a large portion of their audience, then the news should be reported. As Vulture is a media blog, of course their audience is likely the one or both of the subgroups I mentioned above. However, this information has little value on, say, the front page of The Minneapolis Star Tribune or even most pages of The New York Times, as the number of viewers could not possibly affect a sizable number of their readers in general. Cultural proximity matters.
Do journalists have a right to know this information? Sometimes, sometimes not. That's really irrelevant to journalists. The purpose of their work is to provide relevant information to their target audience, whether that is tech start ups or the 112 people of Podunk, Kansas or the citizens of the United States who expect and need a fourth estate as watchdog over its governing bodies.
You know who else wants to know? Netflix's competitors. If their show was wildly popular, that's something you don't want to reveal lest others try to replicate.
"Media consumers may like to know this information as well."
I'm not convinced that media consumers change their habits based on the number of viewers in america. Number of viewers in social circle, sure, but in all of america?
To put that in perspective, Fox News is watched more than MSNBC but the MSNBC viewers won't jump to Fox based on that fact.
Ultimately, the reason why numbers were released historically was for advertising purposes. Shows and networks could demand more money for advertisements if they had more views, and companies like nielsen emerged to give a third-party view (akin to credit ratings agencies). That's not relevant in the internet age, where you can precisely count how many ads are shown and where they are shown (and possibly a bit more about the people watching).
Really? I cannot believe that is a genuine question. You actually think that there is more than a 1 in 1,000 (or 1 in 10, you pick the odds) chance of that being the most irrelevant sentence ever written?
Side note for when you've pointed out my error: in many places [sic] is extremely useful, in contexts such as this it serves as a rather passive aggressive way of complaining about a typo.
2) Do you honestly care about something that is technically slightly incorrect when really it's fine in an informal setting?
3) Not sure how it would be odd, even if my coment had been litered with speling mistakes. I was commenting on the content of that sentence, not how it was written. Feel free to be a pedant the next time you see my bitching about someone's spelling or grammar.
"I'm aware of its meaning, I was asking why you felt the need to use it."
When I visited the "my threads" link on HN you had included:
"Admittedly I'm pretty tired, but I'm not seeing the error you noticed."
Then I clicked "link" because the thread was so nested we had hit the cool off period and there was no reply link in the long discussion page. At that point you had included the "passive aggressive" line. I typed my response and did a "select all + copy" followed by a reload just to make sure you had not edited it again. I thought it looked like it was typeset slightly differently but I could not identify precisely what had changed. At that point I changed the "three" to "three or four" and submitted my answer.
2. Yes. Before I charge someone (who writes for a living) with producing the most irrelevant sentence I am at least going to try and meet the standards of my 8th grade english teacher. It is funny that the person who knows "what should have happened" is always the arm-chair quarterback.
3. "even if my coment[sic] had been litered[sic] with speling[sic] mistakes." Are you screwing with me? If so well played because I almost woke my girlfriend up when I realized what you did with that sentence.
[1] HNNotify sends almost instantaneous email notifications when you have a reply. It is a great way to avoid clicking "threads" every 15 minutes. But it also comes in handy for petty discussions like this. My favorite is reading comments that get deleted shortly after posting. http://www.hnnotify.com
2) Again... relevance? The reason I "was screwing with you" was to make the point that spelling and grammar are not the be all and end all. A good point can be made with terrible spelling, and nonsense can be written impeccably skillfully. "Im board of this discussion now" vs. "This discussion fascinates me", one of those is a valid statement, the other is grammatically correct.
In my opinion spelling/grammar mistakes are indicative of an author who has not put much effort into something because they do not care about the outcome. If someone is willing to take the extra thirty seconds to read over what they wrote I take that as a signal that the writing is worth my time. But I might be in the minority here. My first job (and 2nd and 3rd) was at a restaurant and it was ingrained in me that the little things add up. I can still remember my boss saying "Doogie, if we do not take the time to lay the forks out straight, why should customers expect that we took time to prepare the food well?"
And now it's time to head into the office for a couple of hours!
p.s. Fun fact, the "two" was a genuine mistake. When I don't pay attention my hands often type ridiculous phonetic errors, such as their/there. Heh, even as I wrote this I had "time" instead of "type".
Though it might be hard to translate To Play the King into an American context.
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=house%20of%20cards
Don't worry, I forgot about it too until just now.
I mean Netflix could actually sort out the viewing habits and see who gave it a try and then stopped, and who ended up hooked and watched five episodes the same afternoon they watched it for the first time.
That's super powerful in my opinion.
Netflix will indeed have some of the most powerful analytic tools available to apply to their programming, but we have no way of independent verification. Well, I suppose they may break it down in a quarterly report, but they may not have any reason to.
I think lots of people are interested in the viability of this model. Television format entertainment hasn't been significantly "disrupted" by the internet yet and this could be a step in a new direction, but it'll be hard to tell without Netflix releasing their numbers.
Is good art that which sells, or is good art that which connoisseurs find taste in?
Perhaps the only reasonable response is to admit that there is value in both definitions, and it would be a good thing if the television market allowed for both approaches to flourish.
That said, even if public investors aren't provided viewership numbers, you can sure bet Netflix is paying attention internally. So this is probably just a more private version of the same old ratings game.
In art, wine, whisky, software, many areas it's fine to argue whether quality or popularity is king ($20 blended vs. 30yo single malt, beautiful code vs. news.arc), but not in news. There's good news and there's crappy news, and sadly it seems crappy news is the more popular, but that doesn't mean it's better.
It may generally be a snobby view to take, but I think I'm reasonably unbiased in that I light trashy celebrity gossip and shit entertainment forms as much as anyone.
Side note: Sorkin's The Newsroom tackles the debate of quality vs. ratings when it comes to televised news. It's an absolutely fantastic show (at least it is if, like me, you share the creator's left-leaning politics, I've no idea if people with differing views would necessarily enjoy it as much as I do.)
For one hour a day, the major broadcast networks are required to report news.
What multiple postings show has less to do with which show Netflix produces, but rather that Netflix is making its own show(s).
We live in the transitional period of high price, high production content mainly being distributed via traditional means and lower quality content being produced by independents on places like YouTube and distributed independently.
Netflix is one of the first major companies that bases it's business on Internet distribution rather than cable. That company is now making high production, high price content and distributing that online. People are interested to see how this experiment will pan out, thus generating things like multiple postings about House of Cards.
Anytime a company decides to shakeup the establishment (in this case, cable and pay-per-view), it is extremely interesting to the community as a whole.