Really hard to compete in a media market with a half-dozen established competitors. It requires breakout shows and/or a completely different approach to content and audiences. Fox did it in the late 80s with the Simpsons. The niche approach can work, too, if it truly dominates (like ESPN did in the first 15 years of its existence).
oh man thank god, what a weird desperate play with no partner vertical TV manufacturers to show content and constraining to mobile devices basically made this unusable as a streaming platform
seems like this was a "oops wrong time" money overinvestment? like they made a serious play to enter the market and then, bam everyones back to TV only... great your market has just died essentially and the essential workers don't care for new age apps for content quite as much as the free time on the facebook shuttle crowd
> I wouldn't have guessed people cared about temporary video messages, but look at Snap.
Nobody's paying for Snap either. The only reason they are (somewhat) alive is because advertisers still think burning money on annoying people is worth it based on inflated or misleading metrics. Once the adtech bubble pops they'll be down the toilet as well.
> Seems like a lesson learned about raising money to solve something people don't care about... in this case a first-class mobile experience...
People do want a first-class mobile experience (see TikTok), they just don't want to pay a premium for it. If you charge people for something, you better make damn sure it's way better than the free alternative.
YouTube premium has 20mm paying users. Educated guess most of users consume through a mobile device.
Biggest issue with Quibi was lack of app for TV. They cut their TAM by only focusing on Mobile. I don’t think YouTube premium would be as popular if it was only for 1 platform.
Nobody pays for Youtube Premium because they want the exclusive content. They pay because they hate ads and Youtube gatekeeps basic app functionality behind the paywall. It's not a service it's a hostage negotiation.
Ublock works just fine on Firefox mobile; all you have to do is play YouTube in the browser and not the native app. Sadly, this does not resolve the "disable playback while the screen is off" functionality.
My TV is behind Pi-hole and I'm pretty sure I've never seen an ad on my TV (or while casting).
On phones... sometimes, but that's usually fixed within a day or two.
Before others crucify me for not paying for the content: I'm paying for a subscription service where most of the YouTube channels I follow mirror their content (https://watchnebula.com/). I just cut out Google as an unnecessary middleman.
What? Most video content is exclusive to a single platform already? If you think HBO, Disney+, Netflix originals, etc., are too expensive, you don't have other options there either in paying less from someone else. Why should you expect to be able to do so??
If anything YouTube is the most open platform by far, because the vast majority of the content on there is owned by the creators, not YouTube, and thus it could be on other platforms, in a way that will never happen with the paid streaming services. Indeed this is even happening with CuriosityStream.
Nothing at all. I'm not making a value judgment on Youtube Premium. I'm saying it's not the same class of service as Quibi and thus not a counter-example for how Quibi could/should have succeeded. They're fundamentally different things with completely different non-user to paying customer paths. Quibi wasn't Youtube. Quibi is 2013 Netflix if it didn't have any non-original content. Except 2013 Netflix wasn't dumb enough to charge you money and still show you ads.
> They pay because they hate ads and Youtube gatekeeps basic app functionality behind the paywall.
Ding, ding, ding! The accuracy of this statement is frightening.
I'm annoyed with YT pushing major media orgs' content out because the only reason I watch it is for the smaller creators. But the reality is the ads are annoying.
And it's worth paying for just to be able to listen to the app with the screen turned off. I've also warmed up quite a bit to YT Music even if the UI feels a bit rough around the edges (browser; mobile is OK).
That's me exactly, I paid for the download feature when I use to fly a lot, now I pay because otherwise the ads to content ratio is so bad I don't even try to keep up with creators I like
Based on the sheer volume of content consumed on youtube, some people might genuinely want to support the creators they watch without seeing ads. I'm forever seeing people on HN saying "just let me pay for it instead of watching ads" well youtube gave that option.
"Let me pay for it instead of watching ads" is the part that's said out loud. The part that's only implied is "and stop tracking me, stop making recommendations with the sole purpose of distracting me/keeping me here longer, etc". The part that isn't said is "stop treating me like the product".
No one wants to pay for something where they're still the product being sold. Youtube Premium still has all its trackers, still recommends videos not that it think you will find interesting but that it thinks will keep you watching (for better or worse), and still feeds all of your data into the Google ads network for companies to target you on other websites.
I registered a .us domain yesterday (which doesn't support WHOIS protection-esque anonymity services) and so far today I've received:
* 6 phone calls
* 4 voicemails
* 9 emails
all from what looks like companies from third-world countries offering business development services, website designs, app developers, logo design, etc, specifically asking about the new domain I purchased.
On one hand yes. On the other hand, YouTube recommendations are pretty great. The last time I went to the homepage on a fresh browser, I found almost none of the content interesting. If websites end up tracking users without sending ads and you have self control (turn off notifications and only watch for a fixed amount of time) then it's not an issue.
It's kind of a surprising amount of money, don't watch any of the exclusive content or other services, but I pay for YouTube because I don't want my kid watching ads. I cringe when he has a teacher that plays a video and pre-roll comes up (I almost forget YouTube has ads). What's really annoying is that is school's Google account doesn't have it and his personal does...so there's a bit of annoying Google account juggling.
Why would you be entitled to any level of service for a product that you aren't paying any money for? YouTube isn't free to run. All that bandwidth, engineering work, and creator compensation don't pay for themselves. You either pay with ad views or you pay with cash. YouTube doesn't owe anyone a free experience. They could lock the entire site behind a paywall to paid subscribers only tomorrow, and thus be exactly like Netflix, Disney+, HBO, etc., and they'd be entirely within their rights to do so.
They had to go out of their way to prevent videos from playing audio in the background. They're objectively gatekeeping basic functionality behind a paywall, independently of whether anyone feels entitled to those features.
Yes, companies purposely don't include all desired features in the free tier as an incentive to induce users to upgrade to the paid tier. And features are liable to move between tiers as they fine-tune their monetization strategy.
Yes, they are absolutely doing all of this, and it's entirely within their remit to do so because no one is entitled to any of it for free. Why should they offer all of their basic functionality for free if that means they're not making as much money as they could be if they charged for it instead? The only people they owe background audio playback to are those paying for it, and those people are getting it.
What are you going on about? You have nearly a dozen comments where either I'm seriously misunderstanding everyone involved or you're hell-bent on believing that any description of YouTube's business practices must be a complaint that more things aren't free.
E.g.:
> Ancestor: [paraphrased] YouTube makes money by doing extra work to make a free service more painful to use and then charging to remove those annoyances.
> You: [paraphrased] What makes <ancestor> so entitled as to think that you deserve the free service without the annoyances?
> Me: [paraphrased] No, YouTube is definitely intentionally removing features from their free service and offering to add them back if you pay them. That's true whether or not anyone feels entitled to those features.
> You: [paraphrased] Well duh, it's they're right, and why should they offer those features for free in the first place?
It's a brilliant freemium model that still gives everyone access except those who want a bonus luxury.
You'll have to close the gap on why you think it's bad while still acknowledging that they aren't a charity instead of just leaving your point as an exercise for the reader.
So far it's like complaining that Netflix paywalls the "basic functionality" of being able to watch their videos. Or that a game demo only gives you part of a game when you actually want all of it for free.
Features aren't decided by the effort it takes to create them but rather the value they provide, offset by the revenue they generate.
Background video lowers the value of ads which subsidizes free playback so it makes monetary sense to disable it. It's also a trivial amount of work done once.
> Background video lowers the value of ads which subsidizes free playback so it makes monetary sense to disable it.
On the other hand, video is expensive to serve so the ad revenue per gigabyte should be higher, in addition to getting more hours of listening per user. So it makes monetary sense to enable it.
They're both valid options for making money. So it's fair game to analyze it as a matter of user preference, company preference, and level of rudeness.
> It's the same file being delivered, they don't switch to just audio.
Youtube has separate audio and video streams available on almost everything. I'd be very surprised if it wasted that data, and a quick search suggests it doesn't waste that data.
> Even if they did, the ad revenue without video playback is 0.
Sounds like they're doing something wrong in the sales process.
What's wrong with the sales process? Do you have advertising experience or are you just guessing?
You're vastly underestimating how 10s of billions of dollars in advertising transactions are conducted. It's far more involved than just a "sales process".
I wasn't actually accusing them of doing something wrong, I was saying that as the logical conclusion of your claim. I'm fully confident that they are able to get money for those ad slots. How would an ad slot by youtube be worth 0?
Because the format is video ads. They’re not paying for audio only. In fact most of them are optimized for video first with audio secondary by having visuals that communicate the message. You see the same with Facebook video ads in the feed.
If you don’t deliver what the advertiser paid for then you can’t charge for the ad.
Changing the format for audio ads that would run in the limited scenario of background video involves way too much effort and tooling to make it worth it.
I didn't say I was entitled to it. I said they keep basic functions behind the paywall. They're equally within their rights to make non-Premium viewers watch all the videos in black and white or stop non-Premium viewers from using fullscreen.
Yes, they would be within their rights to do all of those things. And ... ?
I can't even read Washington Post and New York Times articles without paying for a subscription. So what? They don't owe anything to me for free. Thus I have paid subscriptions with them, because I value their content enough to pay for it and that's the only compensation methodology they've found to be workable.
"and" that's the difference between Youtube and Quibi. Youtube was built as a free ad-supported platform for users to create content and present it to each other. Quibi was built as a paid streaming service where users watch professionally produced content for a fee. The track from non-user to paid user for Youtube is completely different than the one for Quibi. Youtube Premium targeted an audience that was already there. Quibi tried to get non-users to pay for the creation of the audience. It didn't work, and it will never work. Every successful paid-only streaming service has to target an already-existing audience. Netflix used licensing to target the fanbase of a broad swath of TV and movie viewership, fans who already existed. Disney did it by owning outright a broad swath of TV and movie material.
It generally doesn't even work in other media. CD sales were built on the back of free radio broadcasts. Pay cable and satellite subscriptions targeted an audience already exposed to television through free TV broadcasts. You have to offer a fundamentally better experience, on the order of "this new thing is the only way to experience non-live music" for people to pay for it sight-unseen.
Your initial comment that I was responding to was:
> Nobody pays for Youtube Premium because they want the exclusive content. They pay because they hate ads and Youtube gatekeeps basic app functionality behind the paywall. It's not a service it's a hostage negotiation.
To which my response was that it's a commonly accepted business practice to create free and premium tiers (it's so common it even has a name: "freemium"), and that this doesn't remotely constitute "gatekeeping" or "hostage negotiation". And it is common for companies to switch models over time, starting out with free in order to spur quick growth and then figuring out monetization later. Make no mistake, YouTube was originally losing catastrophic amounts of money, and what has happened to it is the only path that was even viable. You either need a lot of advertising or a substantial paid subscriber base in order to not suffer huge ongoing losses and be forced to shutter. Just ask every newspaper ever.
I just don't see what YouTube has uniquely done differently vs any other company that has a paid tier or that has grown over time and needed to find additional ways to make money because it turns out that you can't turn around a loss by scaling it.
I don't live advertising either. But I accept that it pays for the vast majority of the content that I consume online.
Yes, but my comment was making the point that "Youtube Premium has 20 million subscribers" is not a valid defense of Quibi's business model. Quibi is a paid-only service that doesn't have the ability to draw on a massive active userbase for paid upgrades and bonuses. Whether Youtube's tactics are or are not fair isn't germane.
To the extent that it's not germane, you're the one who brought it up, and it was fair game for me to reply to. I really thought that was the main thrust of your argument (turns out it's not).
The ability to do something like run with the screen off is not "premium", but it is being sold that way. "Hostage negotiation" is obviously hyperbole, but it gets the point across that it is neither paying for content nor paying for actual premium features. It's paying for them to stop being purposefully annoying.
Au contraire, screen-off playback is exactly the kind of feature that is and should be premium, because the value of advertising that can be sold in this situation is significantly reduced, hence it only needs to be available to premium users who are paying for access and thus aren't showed ads anyway.
"Premium" doesn't mean "fancy" or "hard to implement", it just means "We aren't making money giving this away for free, so you have to pay for it".
I completely disagree with your definition of premium. Something has to go beyond basic functionality to be premium, entirely separate of how it's being sold or not sold.
And someone with the screen off is using far less bandwidth. I doubt it's hard to make money off them, even with reduced ad revenue.
In the concept of the freemium payment model, a premium feature is simply one that yo have to pay for. Maybe you should use a word like "advanced" or "deluxe" or something? Regardless, it's an orthogonal concern; it doesn't matter if it's the simplest damn feature in the world, it needs to be for paid users only. Call that what you will; many call it "premium".
I read it as "this feature is premium specifically because it is not free." Businesses are under no obligation to offer basic services for free, even if they did in the past. If this is good for business is different, but YouTube must have had good reason to push all those features to paid. It doesn't matter how much bandwidth is being used, its to block people from using it as a streaming music for free.
Then they should not advertise it as such. I have not looked at youtube ads for a while, but earlier it was definitely advertising "host your videos free, let your friends watch them free from anywhere in the world, yada yada".
If one advertises "absolutely free email hosting" but means "we will read your email, analyze your behavior and sell your information to those who can effectively hound you with ads", people should push back. And "it isn't free to run" is not a valid defense.
> They could lock the entire site behind a paywall to paid subscribers only tomorrow
Sure they can. But that would likely drive most customers away and be a very bad business decision. My 2c.
Obviously if they put it all behind a paywall then they would stop advertising it as free. My point is that it's their right to do so if that's their wont, not that it would necessarily be the best business decision.
> If one advertises "absolutely free email hosting" but means "we will read your email, analyze your behavior and sell your information to those who can effectively hound you with ads", people should push back. And "it isn't free to run" is not a valid defense.
Show me a single freemium service anywhere that advertises itself using such exaggerated language.
I don't understand why people complain about free services like this. You can't eat your cake and have it too. Choose if you want the ad-supported free service or the paid service and then quit complaining about the choice you've made. You're not ever gonna get an ad-free free service that offers all the same features as the paid service. That would be corporate malpractice of the highest order; they'd have $0 revenue!
> My point is that it's their right to do so if that's their wont
Nobody has suggested otherwise, so why do you keep hammering on this point?
> I don't understand why people complain about free services like this.
Free services are not immune to criticism.
If someone is suggesting an unrealistic business model, that's one thing. If they just say a feature is bad, there's no need to argue with them. They are not obligated to "quit complaining"!
I'm tired of people whinging all the time about freemium payment models. It's bringing the quality of discourse down. If you don't have any sort of realistic alternative and you're just complaining about not getting a service for free and without ads, save all of us some time and just don't bother complaining. It's tiresome.
Anyone should understand that every product has a business model, and if it's being given to you for free the company is going to be making money in some other way. I do support the company having to clearly disclose, on their home page or similar, the specific ways they make money.
Yes, Google could charge money for Youtube. But they don't. That doesn't give it any right to expose anyone to advertising. No one forces it to give away anything for free, it does that voluntarily.
So in your model of how the world should work, advertising is banned? Companies are only allowed to offer paid or donation-only services? And most content online ends up being locked behind paywalls as a result?
Either that or publicly funded. Giving customers the choice to opt into ads is another option – if those ads on provide value, as advertisers like to claim.
That is not what I meant and you know it. There is nothing positive about ads – things don't even get cheaper overall, producers have to recoup their ad expenses by charging more than they would in an ad-free world.
There are no absolutes. Things do get cheaper but you're ignoring several factors like scale, branding and just product awareness that make a difference for consumers.
Sometimes there are absolutes, as in this case. If ads benefit customers, they would seek them out. But obviously they don't value that "product awareness" and branding.
Branding helps in selection process. Product awareness helps in choosing a product to fit their needs. Coupons and other promotions are often sought after.
It seems you're unaware of what marketing actually is and are just personally against ads yourself. That's fine, but it doesn't mean there are any absolutes.
Banning push-based advertising isn't without its merits. I'd be surprised if the majority of sales made via push-based advertising which wouldn't have been made in a pull-based system are actually beneficial to the end user (loosely measured by some combination of regret and opportunity cost), and a system that exists purely to extract value from the populace is not worth keeping around in my opinion, especially as a roundabout and inefficient method of payment.
I think most of the downsides would be in second-order effects (like the paywall bit you pointed out) and in effective enforcement (advertising dollars might just shift to realistic-looking review sites for example). I'm hopeful that free content would still be produced, especially given that for my own personal use I've noticed that ads correlate negatively with quality, and with a few exceptions like academic publishing all the best content is free and without ads even in today's world where it's easy to ad ads to a site.
How exactly are you using the terms "push-based" and "pull-based" advertising here? Are you describing "opt-in" vs "opt-out"? I.e. all advertising would be made illegal unless the user explicitly consented to seeing it, which could be done in exchange for free access to services?
It's an interesting idea, but I don't see how it'd be compatible with e.g. the first amendment (especially the unfortunate recent ruling in Citizens United).
And I'm curious as to what exactly your system would look like in regards to such currently ad-supported services as Google Maps, Gmail, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Would your expectation be that most of these would have to become subscription or pay-per-use services with no free tier? Because I don't see any world in which all of the free services would continue to exist as-is without any ability to monetize themselves through advertising revenue.
> How exactly are you using the terms "push-based" and "pull-based" advertising here? Are you describing "opt-in" vs "opt-out"? I.e. all advertising would be made illegal unless the user explicitly consented to seeing it, which could be done in exchange for free access to services?
Slightly stronger still -- all advertising would be made illegal unless the user explicitly sought it out (e.g. searching for things to buy on Amazon, searching for product recommendations, etc....).
> It's an interesting idea, but I don't see how it'd be compatible with e.g. the first amendment (especially the unfortunate recent ruling in Citizens United).
It might not be legally feasible. I know there are places (in the US, since we're invoking the first amendment) which ban billboards, ban specific kinds of ads (e.g. excessively misleading), ban certain ad-location pairings (e.g. no cigarettes targeting children), and so on, so I'm not totally convinced a motivated party couldn't push it through, but that's not my area of expertise.
> And I'm curious as to what exactly your system would look like in regards to such currently ad-supported services as Google Maps, Gmail, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Would your expectation be that most of these would have to become subscription or pay-per-use services with no free tier? Because I don't see any world in which all of the free services would continue to exist as-is without any ability to monetize themselves through advertising revenue.
Haha, that system doesn't define how those services would work at all -- the idea is that from some kind of first principle (the hypothetical assertion is that push-based ads offer little societal value and large detriments above and beyond the effects of pull-based ads, so they're worth removing) we decide that push-based ads ought to be removed, and any second-order consequences are justified as a response. That's definitely the point I'd attack if I wanted to shoot this idea down, because even with seemingly clear-cut behaviors like killing people we still have to carve out exceptions in the law for all the unforeseen consequences of simply making killing illegal.
I hesitate to speculate too far as to how the market might react if such a law were enacted (and not easily circumvented), but some possible options include:
1. Some of those services (e.g., Snapchat seems vulnerable to that change) would cease to exist, and the companies involved would die or regroup around their other offerings. Not all products are viable in all market conditions.
2. Some others would probably be largely unaffected. Google might double down on "shopping" and other kinds of searches that are legally classified as pull-based and still offer a breadth of services to collect data on you (to offer better results for when you do make pull-based ad queries) and to keep you trapped in their ecosystem so that you can't go to a competitor. Their fee structure for results in those subsystems might change drastically.
3. Some businesses that have an ad-supported free tier _might_ keep that free tier as a way to entice users into paid offerings. E.g., YouTube would drop their ads due to the legal requirement but potentially also limit some other product features to try to convert more people to premium, above and beyond the pay-walling they already do.
4. Many smaller free services already only exist as a charity, a hobby, or some other kind of not-my-primary-source-of-income venture. At first glance I don't think those would be much affected, but if free tiers in AWS and GCP or github actions or whatnot are reduced then that could have downstream consequences.
5. If push-based advertising were banned cold-turkey then it's not totally implausible that we'd finally get mass acceptance around some workable micropayment solution. That _might_ even be integrated with a credit system from some pull-based ad behemoth.
6. Those services might well convert to subscription or pay-per-use. That's prohibitive now in many scenarios because somebody will produce an ad-based competitor, but if that's illegal then you only have to worry about competitors who are actually producing services for free somehow, not those who are producing services for <wink> "free" <wink>. If enough people actually want to produce free services then the ability to monetize goes away, but the need to monetize also goes away since the whole argument about monetization is that we need it to entice people to create stuff. Otherwise, there's still a monetization opportunity, and we can actually charge for the services we build.
And so on. It's really hard to speculate as to what might happen because we're talking about disrupting a $200B-$300B/yr industry. That'll have a sizable impact and quite a few ripples as we reach a new equilibrium.
They have a social contract with the creators: you upload content for free and users will watch content for free. If they went fully paid creators and viewers would go somewhere else in Ain instant.
I don't think that quite represents the existing social contract with most creators. I think the practical contract is in effect "I will upload content and you will compensate me fairly for it". If a subscription-only model led to increased content creator payouts I don't think you'd see a massive exodus from the platform. Regardless, I'm sure it's in the ToS and all that jazz that any of the terms can be changed at any notice and that your only recourse is to yank your videos and take them elsewhere if you don't like how things are going.
And, interestingly, the biggest exodus I've seen hasn't been to another free platform, it's been to a subscription-only platform (CuriosityStream). The documentary-style YouTubers didn't think they were making enough money on YouTube because of how hard it is to make their content vs your typical vlogging stuff, and they know their viewers are willing to pay more to access it, so they made a pay-only streaming site to earn more money from their product.
you're being downvoted, but as someone who used to pay the monthly ransom to be able to play YouTube audio in the background with the screen off, I wholeheartedly agree. I've never watched YouTube exclusive content and couldn't name anything if asked.
very true. I should have been more clear that I was referring to their whole seamless profile vs landscape thing that I personally thought was silly when I tried Quibi. Seems like a good idea in theory tho
It’s not that other video services don’t have a good mobile experience already.
People just care much more about content than the experience unless it’s really really terrible and even then in the case of shows and movies content comes first.
15 min episodes with lackluster content that are essentially only good for your short commute run isn’t and likely never will be what people are looking for.
I honestly didn’t even knew Quibi existed until this year or maybe late 2019 when they had a huge marketing push for their exclusive shows and those shows sucked. You got a disjointed experience akin to a hallmark movie split into short episodes.
We already tried that with “webisodes” in the past and they didn’t survive once streaming became a thing because they couldn’t match the quality of the content of Netflix and co.
Quibi failed because people don’t mind pausing and the few that do probably would rather watch a 20-30min episode of their favorite sitcoms during commute than 1 or 2 episodes of some Quibi show.
The format especially the portrait mode content was also annoying as fuck, this isn’t instagram.
> I honestly didn’t even knew Quibi existed until this year or maybe late 2019 when they had a huge marketing push for their exclusive shows and those shows sucked.
You didn't know of it earlier because it was founded in 2018 with a product launch in 2020.
I knew about it because the TVrage feed spammed quite a bit new shows I guess around April this year and all of them were Quibi, I watched a few (torrent) and said meh.
It kinda reminded me of the webisodes that were popping out everywhere in the mid 2000’s to early 2010’s.
They poured a lot of money into recognizable but still affordable actors but the content was just boring.
"Paid Youtube alternative focused on mobile" has failed to become huge a couple times now (see Vessel as well).
I'm somewhat baffled by the "if we just raise a bunch more money to produce way more expensive content it'll work this time" logic, but if you're a Hollywood person I think it's probably easy to believe that more grassroots/independent youtube-creator productions wouldn't be able to compete with your A-Listers.
> Who knows, maybe in 10 years we'll all be like "Quibi was really ahead of it's time"
From what I've observed, this only happens in two cases:
* Where there was a fan base that loved the product but it just didn't work out.
* Where there was legitimate innovation behind the offering that can't be fully realized.
I don't think Quibi hits either of these points. There might be other signals I haven't thought through, but these are the 2 main ones I've been able to piece together for when people attribute a company being "ahead of its time".
>Will be really interesting to see if anyone steps up to buy the content...
I would be surprised if anyone does. The reason why Quibi was able to get so many creators onboard is twofold. The first reason is they had a lot of money to spend. The second reason is that the deals they signed were very friendly to creators. Quibi got two years of exclusivity with the content, but they didn't own it outright. The creators could reedit the shows into more traditional formats and resell it after two years or even just give it away for free on Youtube and make whatever they can in ad revenue. So while the content will likely resurface eventually, I can't imagine many big players will want to pick up Quibi's side of those original deals.
Also that initial 1 billion round is just dumb dumb money. Honestly one of the worst things you can do to a early stage startup. Just remove all the breaks and any chance for pivots, it's full steam ahead!
The amount they raised is reasonable if the goal is to create a few flagship shows and dozens of less-expensive ones. They went for A+ film/TV talent and actually managed to close deals with some of them.
Did Quibi ever poach any top talent from the other established competitors? I can't remember seeing them attracting any key hires besides the legacy founding team.
I think this failure was the result of an already segmented TV on demand market. Too many options and adding a new one for x reason was just not appealing to public
The funny thing is there is an active thread right now on HN about breaking up Google (including Youtube.) Supposedly, "there isn't enough competition and there arent options."
I don't think anyone is talking about breaking up YouTube itself, unless I missed something. It would be one of the pieces Google would be broken into.
The notion that people think Google's monopoly exists in the streaming video space just might be the most intellectually dishonest thing I have read today. Neat!
My point is how inconsistent all this is -- on one hand, there is discussion about how YouTube should be broken up because there are not sufficient players. On the other hand a huge contender just shut down because there wasnt sufficient interest in yet another streaming platform.
Working on a bootstrapped project and just imagining what I could do with $2billion... Imagine what half the people on HN could do with it. It's obscene. I think they were trying to essentially buy their way into mainstream adoption, but it doesn't really work like that.
> I think they were trying to essentially buy their way into mainstream adoption, but it doesn't really work like that.
It could work if your product met or was at least close to the minimum quality standard of your competitors. From what I've seen and read, Quibi was horribly substandard.
> trying to essentially buy their way into mainstream adoption, but it doesn't really work like that.
Katzenberg comes from an industry (film studios) for which that is largely the model. They are willing to have some expensive failures ($100MM-scale) if the successes will launch a "franchise" which is subsequently mined.
A failure more than an order of magnitude off what's tolerable in his old industry may be hard to survive, who knows. But industrial filmmaking is a lot like industrial food production: a blend of fear (customers won't adopt the new) and dictating the product to the customer.
Well it was $2Bn not $100MM so don’t know how ppl will feel. Probably call it “Silicon Valley style” and disregard it.
The Hollywood model spends most of that money on ppl and marketing, little on tech. K has no tech experience and W only a smidgeon despite her exec jobs (eBay & HP). So I would be shocked if they spent more than $25MM on their stack which is mostly conventional. I’m sure the rest was blown on marketing, high salaries, consultants, offices, and deals with actors.
thanks for the insight, that's really fascinating!
> I’m sure the rest was blown on marketing, high salaries, consultants, offices, and deals with actors
It sounds like the antithesis of "lean startup". Of course it could have worked out the other way if they had nailed market-fit. It does make me wonder if they could try to salvage the tech and try a slight pivot.
I mean, I'm not sure exactly how much credit to give him, but DreamWorks Animation had a lot of tech and he oversaw it for 20+ years. He stood up a brand new animation studio while the industry was digitizing, which means everyone used in-house tools because off-the-shelf stuff wasn't available. They purchased PDI, had been doing CG since 1980. They maintained a proprietary CG pipeline for decades and integrated multiple locations. This was during a time when the industry went from NURBS to sub-d, from basic direct lighting to global illumination to path-tracing--mostly using software written in-house. Not to mention the larger issues of asset management, data center scaling (power, water, and city requirements) and the staff and budgets to support all of that. At scales only a handful of other facilities were doing CG at, while competing for innovation, scale, and quality.
I'm pretty sure Katzenberg and Whitman courted when she was at HP and they were DreamWorks' "technology partner." They worked together on things like a price-friendly color-accurate LCD monitor and the Halo video conferencing stuff.
I know in the years before DreamWorks was sold to Universal there were Skunk Works projects working on phone apps. I imagine all of that was practice for this. I'm sure most of the money was on content and advertising.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by not having tech experience, but he definitely oversaw a lot and worked with people who had.
Worth keeping in mind he left that industry because he became relatively incompetent. Business shifted to franchised superhero movies and he didn’t adapt.
>just imagining what I could do with $2billion... Imagine what half the people on HN could do with it
or alternatively twenty thousand 100k research grants in the sciences. Would be pretty great if we could produce some knowledge instead of more mediocre TV shows.
They are getting minimums, but maybe only minimums.
> "Original, live action dramatic new media productions which are less than 20 minutes in length and made for initial exhibition on a subscription video-on-demand consumer pay platform are not subject to” the tiered breakdowns that help set wage scales “regardless of their budgets."
Another interesting point:
> "While Quibi owns the licensing for its shows for seven years, those terms only apply to the short format. A feature-length edit of each show is also made, and after two years, producers/showrunners/other creative intellectual property holders have the right to sell it to distributors."
this is what it looks like when concentrated capital is misallocated. you get one big flop instead of a bunch of small experiments that give you more bites at the red delicious.
> A starting investment of that size probably qualifies it for a record in the fat (as distinct from lean) startup size category as well.
With that kind of funding, and given who the founders are, maybe “startup” shouldn’t be used at all? The linked article didn’t use that term, and I mean, a startup that becomes worth $1B is called a “unicorn”, and this venture was launched with more funding than that.
It's funny that people are so anti-AR/VR that they called Magic Leap a scam for raising $3B, but a 10 minute video streaming app that burns through $2B in 6 months is completely legitimate? I understand that content can be expensive, but Magic Leap did produce actual consumer hardware, and Microsoft and others have spent similar amounts to make comparable hardware. I'm not saying that Magic Leap is a successful company by any stretch, but if ML is a Theranos style scam, then Quibi was as well.
The reason Magic Leap was called a scam is because they demo'd technology that seemed too good to be true and then never produced a consumer product that delivered that demo. That's why people described it as a scam- there was no good faith understanding they could deliver what they promised. Compare that to Quibi where they have a platform, they have the content that they paid for. The problem isn't they promised something they can't deliver, the problem is they delivered something no one wants. It's not difficult to see how you'd pour billions into original content and a distribution platform. Netflix does that. It's difficult to understand how a company can show you a fantastic demo, spend billions on development and then produce a product that doesn't even slightly live up to the demo.
>$2B gone in 6 months must be something of a record for burn rate
2 billion is chump change for the market they're in. Netflix is spending 15 billion a year on content, Amazon and Apple like 6 billion a piece, and Hulu is around 3.
Cash burn is similar. Netflix is 10s of billions in the hole since they were founded and continues to burn a few billon a year.
She spoke at this year's Democratic convention in support of Biden. Not saying that implies the potential for her to end up in his cabinet, but a lot of Republicans have crossed into independent or Democratic territory the last few years (some while retaining Republican party affiliation for now).
Merit is not a component of American meritocracy. If you're born into an ancient line of people with ridiculous ordinal suffixes after their names, study at Princeton and Harvard, and marry some other guy who also has a ridiculous name, you are guaranteed a lifelong supply of lucrative opportunities no matter how many times you have to write down an eight billion dollar loss after a botched acquisition.
While there are outliers, it was never a meritocracy, it's just an aristocracy and all these people at the top are cronies, sitting on the board of each others companies, paying themselves and others outrageous compensations, that why they can fail upwards and get promoted even more with each screw up, because they are here to maintain the power of a clique. I don't know anything about the Whitman family but I guess it's a bit, old, rich one with a lot of political ties everywhere.
Calling all that a meritocracy makes no sense. It never was. Now the problem today is some people thinking that replacing an aristocracy with a nomenklatura is going to make things better for people at the bottom...
There is a theory called the Gervais Principle trying to explain the dynamics on advancement in the corporate based on the The Office TV show. Don't know if it is true or not but you can read about it here: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Just got around to trying it for the first time last night. I waited until they had an app on Android TV. Nice app. I was surprised that most of the videos looked good on the TV, I had assumed they were designed for portrait mode.
This is not the least bit surprising. They never reached product market fit, and anyone who works in video streaming was pretty sure they never would.
Both Netflix and Hulu have experimented with short form "mobile-optimized" viewing. Short things to watch on your commute or between meetings. Neither had much success with the format.
> Quibi also faces a patent infringement lawsuit filed by interactive video company Eko, which alleges that Quibi stole its technology allowing viewers to watch episodes either horizontally or vertically on phones from Eko.
technology allowing viewers to watch episodes either horizontally or vertically
Quibi has a feature where the content changes depending on if you hold your phone in portrait or landscape. It doesn't add very much and it's annoying to switch back and forth.
But this is a massive company which pumped VC money into an untenable idea. I definitely wouldn't have this level of snark if an independent developer, or at least a good faith startup had to shut down.
It's not so much that you owe them better (massive-VC-untenable etc.) — it's that you owe this community better if you're contributing here. Comments like the GP poison the ecosystem.
I think the reason this failed is simply that good content is device agnostic. I don't think there are a lot of people out there watching Netflix on their phones wishing it was all filmed vertically.
This rings so hollow to me. You have tons of people who are all of a sudden working from home and are still doing lunches, or have lots of free time in general in an age where shorter form content is more prevalent.
Yes, that was their target- but were they really only targeting NYC and a handful of other cities commuters? That's a pretty small TAM. Everyone else in a car and not watching content on their phone.
The content was not compelling, and that's the real story. They overpaid to quickly produce a library with star power and the end results were sub par, and could not compete with free alternatives, or depending on how you look at it- could not force their way into the budgets for consumer's paid streaming services.
While this might be true I think it’s easy to point to COVID as being the downfall of many companies now, when the reality is that many would have failed for other reasons.
For Quibi, it seems the fundamental issue may have been lack of product market fit due to a) not testing, and b) having a shallow understanding of the entertainment market.
How many people are we talking though? Subway trains usually don't get good cell reception, and a huge chunk of Americans drive to work, a time during which they wouldn't be watching video.
What's interesting about Quibi is that it somehow broke the mold as being a really bad idea that somehow got a lot of funding. It's hard to get funding and investors aren't usually stupid. You'll have people that'll make you jump through hoops and do their due diligence. But then once in a while, there'll be something that'll just be a mind boggling disaster that somehow breaks through against all norms. Stuff like Theranos or Nikola.
Sidenote: There are so many important OSS projects that basically get little to no funding while things like Quibi burn millions if not billions in the dumbest way possible.
Citation needed. Every portfolio I've looked at outside of the top firms has had multiple investments (approved by partners) that to my mind look mind bogglingly dumb. Not Theranos level of dumb, where they'd have to have a little knowledge of blood based diagnostics and the statistical significance of results from finger pricks to know its a fraud, but "we didn't do due diligence and found out that this is a perpetual motion machine/founder doesn't own critical IP/financials don't make sense in any universe" levels of dumb. The former slip through the cracks at even the best firms, but the latter is like watching a slow motion train wreck.
With the benefit of hindsight, the entire industry looks like thousands of monkeys with typewriters (especially when biotech gets frothy).
It was founded by Jeff Katzenberg, not you or I. They guy probably has the personal number of all the CEOs in the business and they pick up the phone and listen if he calls.
Then, with the success of Youtube, Tiktok, Instagram pitching a premium short videos app does not sound crazy especially, again, when it's Katzenberg pitching it to you (and he must have invested a good chunk of his own cash).
Then he managed to hire Meg Whitman as CEO and first employee. So now it's Whitman and Katzenberg pitching that idea to you.
Investors aren't stupid, they just have to much money not to be a bit lazy about it and they will follow other money, institutions, investors as a shortcut for not being their own analyst. There's alot of money out there, you gotta out it somewhere not in dollars. It makes it easy to blindly follow those previously anointed as geniuses off a cliff.
It seems seems like some combination of Netflix, YouTube, Snapchat stories,
and TikTok that you could throw on a pitch deck and promise investors will be the next version of TV for millennials.
Starting with 100% original programming makes no sense to me. You have 2 billion dollars, license some mega hits to at least bring people in.
I downloaded the app and saw exactly what I was expecting - “Create account” or “Sign in”, no way to play anything or see any previews. People aren’t going to try so hard to seek out these shows they haven’t seen or heard of before.
It may be offline already. The app no longer works. Well, Flipped was good but not worth paying for and the dual screen mode thing added nothing but expense for them.
Don't forget what might be the most incoherent marketing campaign of recent memory. I spent nearly a year seeing Quibi advertisements and had no idea it was a video streaming service until its financial troubles made it to HN.
This is the first I'm hearing that it's a video streaming service. Shutting down is the best marketing move they ever made, let's see if it works out for them.
They had video ads running constantly on Instagram for months. To me, it was pretty clear what the offering was (long form TikTok/Vine/Reels), and not something I really had any interest in.
It's sometimes funny (ok, sad) how some of the best ideas don't get attention because they're from a nobody, while other products dreamed up by committee (and a committee of hand-waving billionaires at that) who think being rich gives them good judgement get funded to the tune of a small country.
Save some kudos for the big, established TV and movie stars that made a killing producing content that had none of the stress and pain of a movie set or TV studio.
"Actually, Quibi doesn’t own any of the big-budget premium content for which it has shelled out upwards of $100,000 per minute. The company has seven-year licenses on its short-form series; after two years, content owners have the right to assemble the shows and distribute them elsewhere."
If they don't own the content what they hell did they spend 1.7 billion dollars on?!
You have to assume the strategy here was along the lines of: offer insanely creator-biased production contracts to get A-listers to participate in this awful medium, grow the user base, eject the early bait content and transition over years to a more Netflix Original/Amazon Studios model.
So they paid $1mm a 10 minute clip but don’t own the rights. Netflix pays that type of money for their their shows but owns the rights. Stranger things season 1 was $6mm an 60 minute episode.
They own the right to distribute it for 2 years. For everything that isn't Seinfeld or Friends, 2 years probably is 99% of the revenue. As long as Quibi does a decent job of selling those licenses they'll probably recover some of their investment. Oh, and by the end of 2 years Quibi will either be bankrupt or a $100b company, so it's not like it mattered to Quibi.
In my experience, $100b companies tend to be owners of things and not renters. Why would you pay multiple times for something when you were the ones who took the biggest risk in creating it?
> you were the ones who took the biggest risk in creating it?
They weren't the ones though. They had a lot of investors who swallowed this (flawed) business model whole and decided to bankroll it. The people at Quibi don't have to care and likely got away with a decent chunk of $$$ regardless of the outcome.
Sometimes I wonder if I should actually attempt all the business/project ideas I don't think would ever work. Dress it up with some marketing and a "good" pitch deck and let some suckers bankroll it. Best case scenario I'm a multi-millionnaire, worst case I've still got enough to retire on and it seems like the industry doesn't see these kinds of astronomical failures as a bad thing so I don't even have to sacrifice my career/reputation.
I'm half convinced this was a giant payday scheme on the part of everyone but Whitman and Katzenberg. "Oh yes, sounds like a great idea! I need to get paid up front of course" - All the creators and actors cashing in.
I've never liked any management work Whitman has done, and Katzenberg's primary skill is raising money. How could this have possibly gone right?
Interestingly I bought my house from a fairly high up (they have a "head of" title) person that defected to LA to work for Quibi. At the time my wife, who is in media, thought that it was a great move that was pretty much guaranteed to be a home run.
I wonder how they made out on it all. they had reasonably good track record prior and likely had a reasonably good cash component, but any equity they had must be wiped.
I feel bad saying this, but I thank Quibi for my lovingly renovated house. No backsies!
It's obvious this was doomed to failed since it launched, but this is a lot quicker than I expected.
I never really got how it was ever supposed to work. Bootstrapping an entire library to compete against Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, et al? Even with 2 billion dollars of funding that's a tall order.
10 minute shows was an interesting gimmick, but it's not that different than a syndicated half hour. It might even be worse—Too long to have the instant gratification of Tiktok and too short to flesh out a good single-episode story arc.
At American Film Market last year, everyone was abuzz about Quibi before it launched. They appeared to have checked all the boxes. When they launched, my wife (who also attended AFM and is also in the film space) became a user, and I experienced it vicariously. A few thoughts on why this failed, and then simply shut down instead of being acquired.
1) Their hypothesis that short form content was desirable was deeply flawed, and I think based on an assumption that online attention spans are short. This is not true with film and TV where the trend has gone over to binge watching very long form content e.g. Vikings, House of Cards, etc.
2) There was no way to watch their content on a big screen. So that introduced another assumption - that no large market segment would want to consume their content on a bigger screen. We actually tried to watch it on Amazon Fire and the hack is horrible.
3) They decided they wanted to attract a number of A list directors and other talent and blew not only a lot of budget on that, but they also wrote their terms so that after two years they lose exclusivity and after 7 years the content reverts back to the creator. This is insane, if you consider the investment and long term value around the films and series that Prime, Netflix and Disney create. The direct effect of this was that there was no business to sell when they decided to shop the company.
4) Quibi suspended releasing new content during the recent protests, while continuing to burn investment cash. They should have adapted to the times. Even post 9/11 certain films were put on hold, but those were films insensitive to current events. I can't imagine all their content fell into that category.
They still have $850 million in cash and have decided to call it. Sounds like Whitman and Katzenberg actually have a good shot at recouping some of their $10.5 and $5.5MM investment respectively. Which leads me to wonder whether they had that money to burn in the first place. Doesn't exactly feel like a "failure isn't an option" approach - and with that cash still in the bank they could take all their learnings from the initial launch and do a hard pivot. Although the business model may be so fundamentally flawed, for the reasons I've described above, that a pivot isn't even feasible.
Anyone here ever call it and offer to give back 50% of the money to the investors? The one time I've seen it done, it was taken as "heroic" and that exact same board approved a dramatic pivot which in turn watched that money and 3 more rounds be consumed by. "That CEO is a straight shooter to make a hard call that quickly... give him some more money..."
All things being equal, I wonder what the content is really worth, that stuff typically doesn't age well so not maintaining the ownership may not have been a bad thing and it sounds like they recognized that it wasn't going to catch fire and so shutting it down makes sense. I expect the investment community will look upon it favorably. It's easy to criticize and I don't think I'd have ever paid $10 a month for it, but we also live in a world where there is TV streaming to gas pumps. I wonder what people will do when gas stations stop selling gas but it still takes 20minutes to fully charge your electric car...
I know multiple companies that have "called it" and returned money to shareholders. Sometimes outright, others via acquihires when the company has a fair bit of runway.
It's a combination of respect to investors, the drain of working on something that isn't going anywhere, and starting a fresh company (and cap table) if you have something you want to do instead.
> and with that cash still in the bank they could take all their learnings from the initial launch and do a hard pivot.
Honestly, thank god they didn't. Sure, I think pivots sometimes make sense, but I think they realized at this point that all the money they put in was sunk cost, and they're really nowhere closer to when they started, and in fact it's probably easier to start anew if they even wanted to with a lower cost base. Better to call it quits and save their dough.
I wonder why they didn’t just try to monetize what they have, while they have it, on YouTube. That would at least tell you if the content was better than the platform.
But, it sounds like they gave creators extraordinary control.
I actually appreciate that quibi exists, and no it was not obvious/certain at the outset that quibi would fail, despite what all of these reverse-Nostradamus’s say. Quibi pushed into new territory in a highly risky way - that’s cool.
My only gripe is that it’s about low quality entertainment. I prefer we take these big risks with projects that might have truly consequential and positive impact: preventative health, air quality in cities like Santiago and Salt Lake City, ecological restoration near dense urban areas, better understanding of complex social dynamics, waste management, screenless recreation.
> Quibi pushed into new territory in a highly risky way - that’s cool.
Well, the thing is they didn't. Short-form content isn't exactly a new concept; I've been watching short videos for years on Youtube and other sites. And the way that Big Hollywood executives chose to approach making this short-form content appears to have largely been "make a regular long-form content and chop it up into smaller pieces" which is a high risk move only in the way of the "That's a bold move Cotton" meme.
I have to admit, while I loved the schadenfreude of watching Hollywood hubris collide with the terrible launch of Quibi - I am surprised that they are throwing in the towel so quickly. The basic premise of high-quality short-form content actually seems solid. I truly expected them to persist through the initial bad press and eventually run a decent if unremarkable business.
In some ways it reminds me of Vine, Periscope, Musically and the other apps that preceded TikTok. Also reminds me of the quick demise of Mixer.
Maybe it is the case of the right idea but at the wrong time. I can only guess the expenses were too high and they have no option to but to fold.
They haven't been advertising for a good long time. I think they expected that with a big ad spend, they'd develop a user base and build awareness organically after that via word of mouth. That clearly didn't happen, so more advertising would be needed.
At a certain point those ad bills add up, especially if they aren't able to convert enough free trial people into paid users.
I wonder how much of the 1.75 Billion was already spent. I can't believe how they raised so much money in the first place without any market validation whatsoever.
The CEO of Quibi, Meg Whitman, admitted to not being an entertainment enthusiast. [1]
I realize that a company CEO doesn't need to be a subject matter expert, but when you're building a platform focused on millennials (mobile-first), it would help to have someone that can identify with the target audience.
edit: And co-founder Katzenberg has his "emails printed out (and vertically folded, for some reason) by assistant" [2]
I think this hits the core of the problem on the head, that Katzenberg and Whitman thought they knew what millennials wanted, but they simply did not.
They thought millennials wanted "shorter" based on the success of tiktok/instagram/etc. But their content was too long to be short. And the "golden age of TV" we are in basically proves that people don't really want shorter in scripted content. If anything, we want deeper stories. Novellas have never outsold novels. Movies were an outlier for a while, based on the fact it was so hard to produce content, but even movies are now becoming trilogy's+. Youtube is hugely successful because it satisfies niche content, the length is irrelevant.
They thought it should be "mobile", but by limiting it to mobile they meant that you could only watch part of the time. Netflix is perfectly fine on mobile.
The switching back and forth thing feels like a novelty like 1 time then you just do whatever you want and stick with that. Its also hard for creators as you don't know how people will use it, so you have to make it "worse in landscape" and "worse in portrait" so people can watch on either method.
I absolutely LOVE people taking big risks on ideas. This was just a bad idea from the start. I wish they would have blown $1.8B on some shoot the moon healthcare idea or something.
Totally right, imo. I might be old and out of touch, but to me 10 minutes is way too long for content on mobile, and short enough to be kind of annoying on anything else. I'd rather watch a 25 or 30 minute show if I want something short on TV.
I can't help but wonder if this actually holds up under scrutiny. I liked Quibi a lot, the problem for me was always the extreme lack of content. If anything long format media feels tedious to me these days and I lean towards TikTok and YouTube for that reason. The problem that ultimately drove me away from Quibi was the absolute shortage of content. With even a little more content it might have worked for someone with a 30 minute commute but for someone locked inside due to Coronavirus there's just no way that their tiny library was worth the price.
This reminds me of how business types have somehow convinced themselves that the success of franchises like Chipotle is due to "choice", that people really care about choice in fast food nowadays. As if being able to pick from different types of beans was the key differentiator, and not making a popular type of food (not otherwise available at a national chain) and doing it pretty well.
A more interesting, much smaller risk would've been something like a sketch comedy show where every clip is under a minute (Tiktok style). Yeah a ton of amateurs are already doing stuff like that, but - hire them!
Lol, Chipotle is popular with me because you get good quality food that’s healthy enough to touch most areas of the food pyramid all in one meal. Also a filling amount of food at a fair price.
I don't know, seemed kind of unique. It could have taken off. I can see another startup picking up this format and doing it better. Or maybe Youtube could just do it and add it to their offerings.
I've worked for and with Meg. She's brilliant. She's a very good manager when it comes to taking a successful business and making it a lot more successful.
She's not so good at taking something that is new or failing and making it good. She definitely made eBay much bigger than it would have been without her, but it was already successful and growing when she joined. She ran HPE into the ground because it was already failing.
She didn't succeed with Quibi because she doesn't know about how to find market fit.
She was good at setting a vision, expressing that vision, and making sure it was being followed and getting her direct reports to move things in the direction she wanted.
As far as brilliant, I'm referring to raw intelligence. You could tell her new information and she would instantly digest it and apply that to new areas. Also, if you were in a meeting with her once, she'd remember you and what you talked about. If you mentioned that you had kids for example, the next time she saw you months later she'd ask how your kids are, for example.
Sounds like a great COO, someone who can drive and improve existing operations, but not someone who can come up with a vision or, as you said, finding a market.
I'm curious how you would distinguish that from her presence having zero effect, positive or negative, on a company. I don't see how you can possibly know that she made eBay much bigger than it would have been without her. It seems to me just as likely that it would have been the same, and that HPE and Quibi were both doomed no matter what. On what basis is she brilliant, a good manager, and makes a successful business more successful?
The good CEOs I've worked under, had a clear vision for the company and were good at selling that vision both to investors (private and public/stock market) and to the rank and file during monthly or quarterly all-hands. Did she do that?
I'll agree it's hard to say one way or another since there is no opposite case to test against.
But she was good at setting a vision, expressing that vision, and making sure it was being followed and getting her direct reports to move things in the direction she wanted.
As far as brilliant, I'm referring to raw intelligence. You could tell her new information and she would instantly digest it and apply that to new areas. Also, if you were in a meeting with her once, she'd remember you and what you talked about. If you mentioned that you had kids for example, the next time she saw you months later she'd ask how your kids are, for example.
Thank you for clarifying. I agree that makes it sound like she was a good manager. I'm curious, why did she take positions at companies unsuited to her strengths?
> She's a very good manager when it comes to taking a successful business and making it a lot more successful.
Bit of a leap to conclude that right just based on eBay?
eBay would've had astronomical growth under a dog as CEO. As you mentioned:
> She definitely made eBay much bigger than it would have been without her, but it was already successful and growing when she joined.
And that's her one success story. She's had plenty of other opportunities to demonstrate management competency. I think there's a cognitive fallacy where we assume someone is good because they were there and we lived through things with them.
But as others have said, just look at her wikipedia:
I think we should challenge ourselves when defending people just because they were there and they didn't fail.
I don't care how brilliant she was at delegating to managers across categories, etc., the world needs space for better leaders than e.g. those who support Prop 8 (were anti-gay marriage) etc. Like if you don't have empathy there, then it's unlikely you're going to be a better manager than, again, my dog.
A manager needs to be a leader. Perhaps she can delegate and she has an MBA from HBS and she's well-connected in Silicon Valley (I remember her connections to Scott Cook at Intuit, etc. - so much bad shit happened under their watch though, poaching, etc.).
But I don't think any of her behavior (unless you have concrete examples) makes her "brilliant" or a "good manager" - unless the standards are pretty out-of-date. We really should not be defending people who don't evolve (and who are financially very taken care of and have every opportunity to earn trust again, but don't).
UPDATE. I see some examples now in the other comments. Personally I'm not convinced. But that's just me.
> Like if you don't have empathy there, then it's unlikely you're going to be a better manager than, again, my dog...
> ...much bad shit happened under their watch though, poaching, etc.
If empathy is important to you, please consider not using the term "poaching". Employees are not animals that belong to an employer based on an imaginary hereditary right. They have the choice (and often exercise it) of employment at a new place based on the relative attractiveness of both opportunities.
I think the word poaching has taken on new meaning when used in that context though. I don't remember the last time someone used poaching when talking about actual animals. I don't hang around many hunters.
Poaching has a much broader meaning than the one you describe. It's simply taking someone's property without permission. With modern employment contracts (non-competes/no outside work/drug tests...) I believe the comparison to property is quite apt.
I don't think I understand. Under what circumstance does a company A recruiting away employees from company B count as "taking away B's property without permission"? There is no permission needed by law to offer a better employment contract to, well, anyone.
To be clear, I'm not a fan of her personal politics in the slightest, and in fact that plus her love of stack ranking would prevent me from wanting to work for her again.
But I'm saying she does at least have some wins on her track record to justify hiring her.
It’s just interesting how our former leaders might be seen in new light (but yeah not to take away from the solid wins they did have and I think it’s awesome she remembered people’s names and details - the average CEO in the generation before would’ve been hard pressed to do that). Perhaps it’s good that the bar gets higher and higher.
I was talking to my wife about this. And actually read her what I'd written (a Hacker News first for me). And she helped me see that I come off as sort of a woman-CEO-bashing programmer dude.
And yeah, I don't think any of us want that. It's fascinating though how we (not the OP, but perhaps myself and others) so easily jump on the criticism bandwagon for Marissa Mayer, Ellen Pao or now Meg Whitman. I don't think we do that for male CEOs as much.
Anyway, just noting it for those reading this later. Poor choice in wording in the above (I actually love my dog a lot - but the wording probably comes off as insensitive). Which was not the intention, but a good learning moment for me.
I didn't know that Whitman had supported Prop 8, probably a cynical political calculation during her run for governor. To her credit, she reversed course and quite publicly supported its repeal.
I don't think EBay was destined by the gods for greatness. There was zero barrier to entry and they weren't the first. They weren't even the first coming from General Magic where Omidyar had worked. I'm inclined to give her credit for EBay but evidently nothing else.
Steve Yegge's classic "eBay Patents 10-Click Checkout" [1] was published a few years after Meg's eBay tenure, and sums up the lousy UX they never tunnelled out of.
Meanwhile, every history of Amazon points out how their third-party seller project stole eBay's opportunity by focusing on customers first and building a unified product hierarchy.
eBay managed to hold on by being the first 2-sided marketplace to gain traction, enjoying a huge moat much like CraigsList. Over time, it squandered the opportunity.
Meg may know how to keep a company in operation, but she's never shown she can lead a product from scratch. That's just a giant risk to take with $billions of funding at stake.
Meg Whitman is well-established in Silicon Valley and considered to be a a safe pair of hands, which is crucial to have when hunting for investor dollars.
Seems such a strange statement to make. I could understand someone saying they don't like action films for example, but to state that you don't enjoy any film and entirely reject the notion of being entertained is rather bizarre.
Jeff Katzenberg, the co-founder, has been 'making content and selling to kids' for 40 years to the tune of literally Billions. Star Trek films, The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Shrek, How to Train your Dragon etc. etc. - just huge, monster titles.
Whitman was the 'Business Person'.
That said, the content format is really quite different, and it's hard to predict how '5 minute bits' would work, and they spent possibly way too much money on it, it would have been better to 'start small', to find the format that works, and then spend a fortune - which is probably something that Meg should have understood given her background in the Valley.
> Jeff Katzenberg, the co-founder, has been 'making content and selling to kids' for 40 years to the tune of literally Billions. Star Trek films, The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Shrek, How to Train your Dragon etc. etc. - just huge, monster titles.
My argument against this point is simple: few of those were original content conceived by Katzenberg/DreamWorks/Disney. They were existing stories (most already successful as books). The only things I can see in his filmography that are possibly original and hugely successful are Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Kung Fu Panda, and Madagascar, Road to El Dorado, and _maybe_ Chicken Run.
I'd argue that the CEO really should be a subject matter expert for the business domain. They can be ignorant on how it's all put together, that's the CTOs job, but they really should understand the domain.
I think the thing that confuses people is that the true domain for some companies isn't what the end consumer sees. I worked for a car website for a while, and very few of the executives were really car people. But they were all incredible experts on how dealerships worked, and that was actually what our business was, not how cars work.
I am not an investor and don't know what the pitch was, but as a casual observer who was just seeing media coverage, it seemed like before launch it was a pretty vague "new online video streaming service headed by Jeffrey Katzenberg" without details, and they raised a whole lot of money before settling on what the product was actually going to be.
I've got to imagine there's a bunch of investors out there who were pretty disappointed in what got launched
I hope this isn't too harsh, but I really struggle to see why Meg Whitman continues to be hired in these roles and what she brings to the table.
eBay was the world's biggest online marketplace while Amazon was still selling books. eBay could've been Amazon, and perhaps would have been, given a leader with the right vision.
Her tenure at HP was disastrous. And now the Quibi debacle. Can someone please clue me in? I don't know as much as I'd like about her career.
Hasn't Ebay been consistently profitable under her tenure? I also imagine the company did pretty well after spinning off PayPal after acquiring it in 2003.
As for HP, has anyone done a good job there? Carly Fiorina had the Compaq debacle, while Leo Apotheker wasted $9 billion buying Autonomy to turn the company into the American SAP.
So let me get this straight: a video streaming service fails, and they're blaming... the pandemic? I don't think there has ever been a time in history when people have had more time to sit around watching videos.
I actually wanted to give my money to Quibi, but they made it too hard to do so. I really wanted to see the new Reno 911 skits, and I didn't find them anywhere besides Quibi. I was ready to pay and I tried to find an option to watch Quibi content on my desktop, but it seemed like there wasn't any. Only mobile. Yeah, go ahead and dictate to users the exact manner in which they must interact with your product. Don't allow any alternatives. This is what happens.
It was mobile first, so I could see how you could argue that a pandemic was bad for a platform built around mobile. Having said that, the management seems to have been crap too and it seems crazy that they weren't able to acqui-quit.
I haven't used it for watching video media, that's gone way down now that I'm not commuting. When I watch videos now it's almost always on the TV instead. I'm not even sure if my streaming device supports Quibi.
Isn't the whole pitch that they're bite-sized? So you'll watch a clip on the toilet or while waiting for your turn in the covid test line. Mobile games and most apps are doing better than ever. This whole thing had a very "fellow kids" vibe, so I think the content must have been the main sticking point.
Yes, but you have no idea how long that bite size will last. While scrolling your feeds or playing most games, you can stop at any time. You can't say ahead of time "I'm going to spend 6-8 min waiting in this line / at the toilet, enough for a byte-sized episode".
There is this thing called a pause button. Which basically invalidates the whole concept of “bite-sized” entertainment to begin with. My biggest deterrent from streaming video away from home is data usage, not the length of the content.
I don't know if other people feel the same way, but I definitely feel a downside whenever I get invested in something (even a small bite of something) and then have to pause halfway through and resume at a later date/time. Tension drops, references to earlier things lose some meaning, you're completely pulled out of whatever you were watching and it starts feeling more like a disjointed effort to watch instead of a singular experience to enjoy.
Yep, that’s the irony: as much as they promote bite sized entertainment, their ten minutes is still too long for the use case they’re looking at. For people on the go (in transit, waiting in line), users want content that you can drop immediately. Like Reddit of Facebook or instagram. At the point where they’re willing to focus attention ... they want much longer stuff anyway. Quibi fails on both fronts.
There is no pause button on human emotion. Good content evokes emotions. There’s a reason we use violent phrases like “torn away” when describing being pulled from an emotional state that some content put us in.
It’s kind of funny they got Meg Whitman to be the CEO of Quibi. Pretty sure Bella Poarch (or someone similar) would be a more appropriate choice for knowing how to get something viral.
She was for Ops. They had Jef Katzenberg for content. That said, maybe neither of them had their finger on the pulse, and they are too old and rich to be 'hands on' founders - so without some really competent lieutenants this was going to fail.
$1B is goddam lot of money to spend on something with $0 capex.
The mobile app is a tiny cost.
So you have paying for the content then distribution. The later should have been royalty based and also drive most of the distribution.
"Mobile first" implies that there's something second. Like a webpage that's optimized for a mobile experience but is also viewable on desktop. This could have been Quibi: they made vertical videos ("optimized for a mobile experience") but they could have also allowed users to view those videos on desktop. That would have been mobile first.
Do you understand how the culture changed, though?
Do you realise people used to consume a lot of media on their phones vertically... but now they don't... for obvious reaons.
That can't be that hard to understand? Market changed. Previously valid opportunity vanished. They didn't do anything wrong but be around at the wrong time.
Portrait on TikTok makes sense because the videos shown in algorithm driven order and are usually around 1 minute long at most. People are also swiping to skip to the next video, and you can't swipe comfortably in landscape.
A 10 minute Quibi episode is already half the length of a standard sitcom with ads (20 mins). It's not meant to be skippable. There really wasn't a need to make it portrait mode.
Almost every TikTok video I see is vertical. They're going gangbusters. The culture hasn't changed. There never was room for something like Quibi. They had a shit business model which (as far as I can tell) was "people who ride the subway or take the bus, who will pay $8 a month for 1/3-sized episodes".
Because all other viewing scenarios still exist even with the pandemic.
I know this is content sacrilege, but I actually think that TikTok nailed it on the head with vertical video. Vertical video means that you can actually fit a single person into the whole frame and have detail. Horizontal video is all about close ups and wide shots, and that takes a production team to think about it.
Vertical video means you just put the phone the same way it always is, and everyone can see everything from floor to ceiling.
I literally started watching TikToks because of the pandemic. One month of "shelter at home" encourages a ton of media consumption and it can easily be on your phone.
For me it simply comes down to the fact that nobody needs "bite sized content" when there is a pause button on every single streaming site there is. Watch 10 minutes, bus stop coming, hit pause. There's no need to pay for "quibi", and for me at least there was never any question that they would fail. At least they aren't beating a dead horse spending billions to try to make it happen, "fail fast" I guess.
Even if you (for some reason) wanted bite sized content that fits into the time you wait for the bus, you couldn't do that with Quibi, because your bus doesn't arrive in exactly 6 minutes 30 seconds (or whatever). You still have to pause.
It was likely never going to be compelling enough to compete with free a a purely-short-form mobile-focused offering.
Look at how much grief Hulu got from users for being "paid but still with ads" for so long before at least adding the option to remove the ads, and then question how smart these other companies who think "paid but still with ads" is a great plan. Sure, you can get users with that model, but you do it if you have content that's compelling enough in spite of it, it doesn't help.
Media consumption patterns haven't dramatically changed, people still sit with their phones and scroll. Sure, people have also been Netflix binging on their TVs, but they are also doom-scrolling on Twitter and FB, and kids are instagramming and tiktoking and snapchatting.
I don't get this "mobile". What you're talking about is "phone" first. People mostly use laptops for school/work, they spend their personal time on their phone.
Saying that the pandemic has stopped people using their phones for this purpose is excuse-making bullshit.
> go ahead and dictate to users the exact manner in which they must interact with your product
Well, Netflix did that for a long time, too. Last time I tried to watch Netflix on Linux it was still impossible (supposedly you can do it now, but I haven't tried in a few years). Restricting modes of access isn't necessarily a death knell.
I've been watching Netflix on linux since late 2018~early 2019 (can't remember exactly when I opened an account). Not sure when it's fixed but I had no problem.
Criterion Channel doesn't work on linux though, which I realized only after buying their product and watching a few movies on my Mac. Had I known it I would never have bought since I spend 90% of my time on linux.
Netflix on Linux has worked since at least 2015, although very early on you had to hack the browser string to make it work and you had to use Chrome. Now it works without fuss in Firefox as well, but you may have to install "non-free" extensions depending on the distro, so purists are still out of luck.
Well, Netflix at least kinda makes sense from a business point of view. The reason they don’t allow watching on Linux is because some of their content providers insist on a DRM scheme which they can’t guarantee will be secure on Linux. I disagree with this on an ideological point of view, but from a business point of view it makes sense as Linux is a minority in their potential user base.
Quibi’s decision really does not make sense. It is reasonably cheap to release a viewer app or website for the mainstream browsers & OSes, and indeed if there is a good Quibi show then offering it on desktops & TVs would significantly improve the viewing experience and bring more people in.
Netflix on Linux has worked for many years, but lots of content was (is?) limited to 720p or even 480p. This doesn't actually have anything to do with Linux - the same limitations apply to Windows as well unless you use Edge or the Microsoft Store app which implement a stronger level of DRM.
Everyone else in this thread is talking about how Netflix _now_ (or sometime recently) works, but it didn’t for about a decade.
The difference is the market share for Linux. It wasn’t that important. Restricting a paid video service, especially where the content are professionally produced, to mobile devices, and where you can’t use the excuse that it’s a social media platform, sounds like suicide.
While I see where you're going with that, in all fairness Apple has made an effort to shove Apple TV+ onto pretty much every streaming device, including non-Apple ones.
It increases the number of people who get family Apple Music subscriptions, so it makes sense from a business standpoint. iMessage on Android, however, would kill the iPhone's biggest network effect.
Honestly I don't feel like the iMessage network effect exists much at all anymore. Sure, I use it frequently for communicating with other iPhone people, but I just as easily communicate with others using WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal.
In fact I generally prefer Telegram to Apple Messages.
Is this an American thing? I've owned an iPhone and currently still on a increasingly crap android phone and I've never ever heard anyone get hazed for iMessage colours or similar.
Yep, it's totally an American thing. The rest of the world uses WhatsApp, so it's much less of a big deal. But people actually do leave other people out of group chats because it would downgrade the experience from iMessage to MMS. The green bubble is just a reminder of the terrible photo/video quality and poor group features.
Are Americans still using MMS? Nobody in the UK uses it because of costs... are MMS free there? My impression is that WhatsApp is much better (and Wechat better still). Privacy questions aside.
As an American, my entire circle communicates almost exclusively using services like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram.
iMessage shows up occasionally while forming initial connections, but I tend to move the conversation to one of these other services as soon as possible and the other party is almost always OK with that. (I do this in part because I don't regularly use my Mac and these other programs have web versions that can be used on all platforms including Windows PC.)
If you're curious about demographics I'm in my mid 30s. My particular social group is not big into Facebook or Facebook Messenger (though I know they own WhatsApp) since we are techies and privacy-conscious. I'd rather have a 1on1 or small group chat than blast thoughts out into the ether when in that mode of communication. (Hacker News is different. It's cultivated, moderated, and oriented around exploring curiosity.)
WhatsApp isn't as common as you might think, although still the largest. It's either Messenger or WhatsApp, so still Facebook. [0]
My personal pet theory is that it depends on when the country got free text messages. For example in Sweden everyone already had unlimited texts before smartphones were ubiquitous, therefore WhatsApp never really had a purpose and Messenger became the supplementary app.
> Asia is LINE/WeChat. Very few use either FB or Whatsapp.
This is...not true. Line has Japan and Thailand, WeChat has China and the mainland diaspora, and the rest is mostly dominated by Messenger, WhatsApp, or a local app (e.g. Zalo in Vietnam or KakaoTalk in South Korea).
Source: me, a person who has lived in Asia for a long time, and the bulging folder of messaging apps on my phone.
Nice! I actually just checked and it seems like AppleTV works in Chrome on mobile now, so I could chromecast although there's a bit of a quality hit and it prevents me from playing around on my phone while watching
Apple, for their part, seems to want up make you happy. So it behooves them to make things just work. I can watch my YouTube videos streamed effortlessly to my TV.
The pandemic is fuelling viewership, but killing advertising. It's also making video production difficult
If paid subscriptions failed to fill the ads hole, the yes, the pandemic would be bad for business.
That's on top of competing against Google, Facebook, and established broadcast/cable advertising markets, with likely unestablished or unattractive demographics.
Does Quibi have ads? My understanding is that they are a paid service (with free trials) but aren't an ad platform themselves. Thus, if anything, they should've benefited from the pandemic as the falling advertising supply meant they could advertise for their own service for less money than usual.
The streaming service attracted blue-chip advertisers including PepsiCo Inc., Walmart Inc. and Anheuser-Busch InBev SA, securing about $150 million in ad revenue in the runup to its launch.
This doesn’t seem as crazy as it appears on the surface. Quibi was streaming video targeted at people on the bus/train or sitting behind a register with nobody in line. It had no interest in serving people stuck at home.
How is it different from a consumer perspective? As a consumer I have the ability to choose when and what media I interact with. Wouldn’t Quibi be a fun distraction at home for 10-15 minutes?
and that right there is why quibi failed - the only quibi clip I've seen was taken by someone using another phone to record it and post it to twitter. By not allowing viral hits to be easily shared on any platform they shot themselves in the foot.
There are so many ways they could have allowed sharing of clips/photos without giving copies of all their content to other services (which I imagine was the motivation for making it effectively impossible to share anything on other networks).
I would definitely put TikTok much closer to Quibi/Youtube than to Twitter/Facebook. Maybe Instagram, but most people go to TikTok to consume media, not to conversations.
The vast majority of twitter/Facebook users are consumers and not conversationists. Besides, I would say tiktok has the same amount of conversations as twitter.
To be fair, I wouldn't be surprised if a large % of TikTok users watch are on the app for durations equivalent to full length content. I see two, three, even four hours/day spent in the app surprisingly frequently. It's built to be addictive and keep you scrolling.
That’s a really strange concept of “same”. You’re saying that if one business makes a stupid decision (overpays for an input, in this case, content), while the other one doesn’t, then they can’t be compared, merely on account of one having made the stupid decision and thus you can’t really say it was stupid?
I don't understand how you possible cannot realise there is a difference between hosting other people's content (UGC, in your example tik tok) and producing/sourcing/paying for content (in your example Quibi).
There is a difference between being a librarian who sells 1000 books and being a librarian AND author who sells AND writes 1000 books
Of course there's a difference! Any time you have two things with different identities, you can point to a difference. The important question is whether they have a difference that is applicable to the defense/failure explanation that was offered. My point was that Katzenberg does not.
Katzenberg claimed that "gosh, you just can't make money on a short-form video content service right now, there's covid and the lingering effects of 9/11 blah blah blah."
Oops, major counterexample: Tik-Tok. YouTube. Instagram/FB stories.
Dubious defense: "Oh, those aren't remotely comparable, because they paid less for their content. Obviously, the world turns upside down and the two become incomparable once you fill that service with content you paid too much for. You can't go with the much simpler explanation that we were just much worse at finding content people would be willing to view at a price sufficient to cover our costs."
>There is a difference between being a librarian who sells 1000 books and being a librarian AND author who sells AND writes 1000 books
Okay, if you want to go that route, the analogy would be:
Pointy-haired boss: "I'm going to make a fortune creating and hosting books."
PHB: <fails>
PHB: "Well, gosh, you know, people just aren't really reading that kind of content now, so of course it's going to be unprofitable."
Creators: "What? We make plenty providing content."
Bookstores and conventional libraries: "What? We make plenty of money buying and hosting content."
PHB: "No, you can't compare that, because I try to do both!"
Quibi is just the same, except that you can also add:
YouTube/TikTok: "Huh? We make money hosting free content where we share a cut of the advertising with the providers."
At what point do you say, "No, dude, the market is there, you're just bad at it"?
TikTok isn’t $4.99 a month. Now, I would argue that even if it were, it would be more successful than Quibi, but free versus subscription (and the subscription still included ads) are very different things.
Because the product is not Hulu but the TV shows that you can stream exclusively on Hulu. Clearly very few people were convinced Quibi had content that they needed to watch.
It is crazy that they doubled down on the mobile-only strategy instead of trying harder to iterate, the pandemic has been going on for months. You're telling me they raised all of that money and couldn't stand up a basic web client just to see what would happen? The leadership says quite a bit about it IMO.
Meg Whitman has had a legendary career, but even she doesn't appear to have experience founding a tech company. She started at P&G and then went to eBay when it had 30 employees and $4M in revenue[0]. And the founder came from Hollywood, neither of them had real founder experience.
I would love to read an insiders account of what happened between the company's formation in August 2018 to April 2020, when the product launched. It looks like they got tons of media deals lined up before the app launched, I wonder how much product development and discovery they were doing during that time.
I'm not saying that everything she touched turned to gold, but I am saying that she's one of the most high-profile executives in America. Princeton undergrad, Harvard MBA, SVP at Bain, CEO at eBay, HP, primary candidate in a gubernatorial race. That's absolutely a stellar career that most people can only dream of.
Ugh, this is a trite and worthless comment. You can't shake a stick in business without hitting ex-MBB leadership. Some of them suck, some of them are mediocre, some of them are spectacularly good.
> You can't shake a stick in business without hitting ex-MBB leadership.
I don't work with any. I exclusively work on early-stage startups, so all my companies have teams of 3-20. They're also mostly bootstrapped.
I've tried partnering with ex-consultants in the past, but they add no value. They don't have deep industry contacts to sell to. They don't have hands-on experience actually building anything. They make nice PowerPoint presentations, and that's literally it. They constantly over-promise and under-deliver.
They also often demand high salaries at early stages, because they're used to making $300-500k, but that's a whole other issue.
I wasn't being trite. I consider having management consulting (especially MBB) to be a negative on a resume of someone I'm considering working with. It's essentially a disqualifying issue for me after many bad experiences. Maybe the next person is the exception, but it's not worth the risk for me anymore.
Being in leadership is even worse, because you're complicit in destroying so much shareholder value. You charge $100M for something that delivers no real value and costs your firm $10M. Why is that something we should admire?
> Some of them suck, some of them are mediocre, some of them are spectacularly good.
What are they spectacularly good at, though?
I completely agree that many of them are brilliant, but what skills are they honing, exactly? Brilliance by itself is not enough to make me want to work with someone. Experience is much more useful.
The experience gained tt consulting firms seems to be sales (of a very specific type), making beautiful presentations, and bending data to fit whatever narrative people want it to. Maybe they do some legwork gathering data or running some regressions, but they're usually starting with a preconception of where they should end up.
I have a friend who's a partner at Accenture, and he feels exactly the same way about management consulting that I do: it's bullshit. Another friend at McKinsey described his analyst job as "knowing how to wear a suit and be on time".
I've heard of so many disasters caused by management consultancies. Where are the success stories? At best, they just give a company's managers some data that validates what the company already wants to do, but maybe it's a little too risky.
Somewhere in the middle, perhaps they find a way to sneakily kill a pension program or fire 10,000 people. They're creating value for the company, but it's not exactly work your family will write about in your obituary.
At worst, they burn through piles of cash and accomplish absolutely nothing.
Often MBB consultants are brought in with privileged permissions too - they get access to data, meetings and personnel that internal staff don’t get access to, and the end result is a fancy PowerPoint with a few well-spaced bulletpoints about simplification, efficiencies and renewed cost cutting. Hardly rocket science.
Further, their tendency to use the latest hype (big data! blockchain! data is the new oil! machine learning! etc) in their consultative sales model often shows their hand. They read the same stuff as everyone else, they just went to a fancy university and as you note ‘know how to wear a suit’.
Then once the PowerPoint has been presented, they go off into the wilderness after cashing their checks, or appear at another part of the company working on an unaffiliated project purely based on their connections and brown-nosing.
Has any research been done on the efficicacy of decisions that MBB consultants make in corporates? What empirical evidence is there that these consultants actually deliver value over the medium and long terms in relation to a placebo (ie the current management of a company)?
I don’t doubt they are generally intelligent and well-read, but so are a lot of internal staff and non-consultants.
Update: added last sentence, fixed some spelling errors.
>Princeton undergrad, Harvard MBA, SVP at Bain, CEO at eBay, HP, primary candidate in a gubernatorial race
You just listed the standard elitist silver spoon CV. She had a stellar career because she was born into it. Her track record at all of these institutions speaks to her actual talent.
I think Meg Whitman is a pretty horrible CEO, not to mention she appears to treat people like shit. This article by Rob Enderle (from back in August mind you) gives a good overview of her poor leadership:
One does not necessarily beget the next. That is, there are plenty of folks who went to Princeton who didn’t make it to Harvard MBA. And many Harvard MBAs who dont become SVPs at major firms. And so on.
In fact, under your philosophy, how could one be successful at all and not have you scoff at their success? Does the person have to literally go from rags to riches?
I do not deny that each step in her journey made it easier to take the next step. They made it easier because they were necessary. They are also hard work and long hours. It’s not a life I would volunteer for.
Now, if you want to talk about folks plopped into plumb positions by family members of powerful politicians, cough Hunter Biden, cough Jared Kushner, then you can talk about silver spoon elitism all you want.
Plenty of people work hard. Most of them do it for peanuts. I guarantee plenty of people at eBay worked harder than Whitman, for example; that place was an exploitative sweatshop in her era. I expect her maids worker harder than her, too.
Sure, she was good at working the system that her elite upbringing put her on track for. Among the managerial caste, she was unusually good at ladder-climbing. And she was certainly lucky to join a dot-com success story at the right moment. But being good at managerialist skills and selling one's self aren't all that it takes to succeed at business. Indeed, that can be a real handicap, because being good at working other Harvard MBAs doesn't mean a thing when it comes to pleasing people you want to pay $4.99 a month.
So from your analysis, it seems like she’s in the wrong industry? Her elitist background makes her a poor candidate for a B2C company, but maybe, IDK, a hedge fund is where she belongs? Or running anything else where her customers are other elites?
She has a billion dollars. She won. Good job, game over. My analysis is that before she does any more damage she should donate 99% of her wealth and retire. If she's looking to do something socially positive, which I'm not particularly expecting, she could go raise money among her set, or advocate for a cause.
Do you have actual evidence to back up your “guarantee” or are you just speculating? I don’t understand why so many folks come to the internet to pontificate like experts about things they know so little about.
Speaking of, what managerial caste are you talking about? Your use of that term insults people living under an actual caste system.
Haha. I was about to make the comment that university prestige means didley in actually running a business. Whats worse is they raised more than a billion dollars which boggles the mind on how you can fail so hard with people literally throwing money at it. How amd where did the money burn at that rate?
Whitman's success to failure ratio is astonishing and that failure tends not to be attributed to the prestigious education...oddly.
I see the pattern there. I’m from Europe but worked with US management. They came with previous titles, and with good understanding on the importance of self marketing even after hired. All their focus was on delivering the low hanging fruits after that only smoke&mirrors. Then after getting C level position they were fired, and started at another company at an elevated position. I’m not saying this is bad, but not something I would call a stellar career. It elevates people on a ladder but but not in a way Children dream of...
Why was this downvoted? I feel this is very true. Having worked a few years in a corporate environment, suits and ties, especially higher up the management chain, are almost exclusively about self promotion, bullshitting, and smoke and mirrors. Throw them out into the wild and they wouldn't have a single idea of how to make a living or business except to get another job with their bs skills.
Only wierd part of this is the comment of how "children dream of"
Exactly. And they're responding to the incentives in the system we've built. CEO tenure has dropped dramatically over the decades, while CEO compensation has skyrocketed. I can't find a measure elsewhere, but I'm sure sub-CEO executive position tenure is way shorter.
So if one is playing to maximize cash, the optimal strategy is to be very good at bullshit, self-promotion, and generating impressive short-term metrics without regard to long-term impact. You have to look good, and then you have to avoid the long-term consequences of your choices. Then when you get to the top, it's even more important to juke the stats so that executive compensation is maximized. Because by then you're standing on top of a pyramid of bullshitters with little devotion to the workers or the customers.
So much of that is pure elitism. Didn’t she spend the most money ever on her race? And lost? How Is that stellar? I’d be ashamed of that. Not the losing part. The trying to buy your way in part.
otherwise all you’re saying from the get go is she had her foot in the right doors and was able to get good jobs at P&G and Bain. Do you think she truly earned the jobs or was truly the best candidate for those jobs out of everyone? Her eBay tenure is not destroying the company, but instead letting it do its own thing without actually doing anything else. You can see the results for yourself over the past decade.
You’re right most people can only dream of such things because dreams usually contain thinking about luck, lucky breaks, winning capitalism, though not necessarily out of skill and talent.
And people wonder why social mobility is so low in the US...
Your comment is emblematic how how inefficient our oligarchical system is. It's like saying someone would be a good general because his father is an important feudal lord. That's the way it was throughout the vast majority of history, but we pretend it is different now.
Meg is part of a generation that treated devs (originally called “implementors” when she was young) like interchangeable technicians or “plumbers”. Jobs, was also part of that generation, except he was way “cooler” about it (in order to squeeze more productivity out of his plumbers than say, his original employer HP). Some of Jobs’ peers learned to do the same thing with their plumbers achieving varying degrees of success but a lot of FAILURE. To her credit, I think Meg always has understood you don’t give cash to some half-baked hipster because of their black turtleneck and story about a low barrier to market, but due to her limited perspective (she is not GenX), she didn’t know the proper balance to grow something like eBay into something like $3,000/share Amazon. I do think she is a winner and was a wise choice to get Katz’s mobile-first content out the door..the failure is due to mobile not being a thing during the Shelter In Place orders.
Your comments on Jobs are weirdly off the mark. He had huge respect for engineering and said top engineers could be 10x or more as productive as the average. He certainly didn’t think they were all interchangeable. He said he hired the best engineers because he wanted them to tell him what needed doing or how to do it. Also he never worked for HP.
But technically Steve Jobs did work for HP once... he had a summer job at HP at age 12, which he landed after calling Bill Hewlett asking for some spare parts to build a frequency counter.
I don't think this is a generation thing. The strategy of treating devs as interchangeable cogs is still absolutely thriving in management circles. The only differences now are that it's often glammed up with a bunch of lip service that seems to suggest the opposite approach (but no actions to follow that up), and that there's very successful pockets not using that approach, that aren't representative of the majority of the industry.
I don't think either approach is necessarily 'wrong' either, because I've seen tons of companies have great success with staggering numbers of thoroughly mediocre devs and lots of turnover. But you very likely have to commit to one strategy or the other, the absolute shittest places I've worked are the ones where they're kidding themselves, unsure what they're trying to do, or half way through a transition from one approach to the other.
As dumb and unintuitive as it sounds, I think you can run a big bank very successfully with 200 engineers siloed into small teams of experts, or with 3000 engineers shoveled into big "tribes" (or whatever the buzzword of the day is) of distributed responsibility. But I'm wary of anyone that's trying to do it with 800 engineers, especially the "we only hire the best!" variety. (those three numbers obviously scale with the size of the business and a bunch of external factors).
He would put aside time to identify and heavily recruit engineers he thought were talented.
Scott Forstall has a story about how Jobs was basically afraid that he (Forstall) would be put off by the rest of the HR process and pulled him out and told him he's getting hired and to just go through the motions.
Cabel Sasser from Panic has a story about how Jobs and Schiller tried to recruit Panic to work at Apple.
Bill Atkinson also has a story about Jobs spending a day pitching to him to join the Apple engineering team.
> I do think she is a winner and was a wise choice to get Katz’s mobile-first content out the door..the failure is due to mobile not being a thing during the Shelter In Place orders.
"Mobile only" is a self imposed limitation, so that's on Katzenberg and everyone else who had influence on that decision.
Katzenberg is more of the legend. I'm not a hollywood person, but recognized the last name immediacy. He is responsible for producing The Little Mermaid, Beauty & The Beast, Aladin, and Lion King. Basically the best Disney masterpieces ever, and the only other company to fight Pixar on the big screen. Quibi has always been a terrible idea. I hope he find great success in his next endeavor, maybe a classic USA hand drawn animation studio !!!
That idea will probably bring him to bankruptcy immediately... I'm not expert in the industry but apparently hand-draw animations as an industry are in a serious dump. The animators are seriously overworked and underpaid, especially in japan, so much so that the majority of it nowadays are already being outsourced to places like India and Indonesia. You'll probably burn cash faster than you can literally burn cash if you try to run a business like that in the USA
I can't imagine Katzenberg doing this (I don't think his interests are actually animation or anything "traditional"), but hand drawn animation is just "out of fashion" and the business people don't think the ROI is enough. Look at the budget for Princess and the Frog or other hand drawn projects around that time compared to CG films. Hand drawn cost around $80-100 million while CG is closer to $150 million (a large chunk for both is usually voice talent). Disney had tossed their old animation system CAPS (and I'm pretty sure all their old desks) and they built a brand new pipeline around off the shelf software for the production--subsequent productions would have been cheaper.
DreamWorks Animation, as one existing example, is still doing a lot major 2D projects (though certainly not "traditional hand drawn" as technology has shifted a lot post-Flash) as the animation house brand for Netflix these days. (She-Ra and Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, as two recent examples.) At least in "TV budgets" 2D animation is seen as more than competitive again (though it was a much briefer period where all TV projects seemed to be CG, and 2D never really "died" in TV like it did in features) and it's likely just a matter of time and aesthetic drive before someone (maybe even Disney) tries it again at the feature level. (Supposedly Rastetter was still pushing for it at Disney Feature Animation even after Princess and the Frog and right up to his ouster. Who knows when a successor will champion it as a priority.) It probably won't be DreamWorks Animation today unless Netflix has some reason they want to do an animated feature. (It is an Oscar category they could compete in, if they need the motivation to push. Maybe less controversy in that category for winning as a streaming site than their battles over streaming versus theater in other categories.)
(ETA: Oh and I just remembered that Fox, the crazy Australian company not the parts of Disney formerly known as Fox, and its subsidiary Bento Box do have a full Bob's Burgers feature film release on their schedule. Not that it entirely compares to the prestige of a classic DFA fairy tale based film, but there's at least one attempt at a 2D animated feature film in the near future.)
> It's impossible to determine this what-if scenario though, so I agree it's best to leave out the speculation.
What are you talking about, CEOs get criticism all the time. Especially on HN where people are aggressive about their opinions. Just because you can't do alternate reality simulation doesn't mean you can't say anything about this.
I mean might hope the requirement to provide said meta-analysis would fall on the person making the claim that the criticism is sexist, not on the person saying it might not be?
I was not saying it might be, I was stating the premises on which it would be, while also stating that, since we can't claim it either way we should refrain from speculation.
GP then suggested we could claim something, and I pointed out the requirements for that, thus putting the onus on them for making the suggestion we could.
Dude in this thread itself people were riffing on Steve Jobs, one of the most successful CEOs in the history of America. In light of such a thing, I am inclined to think your call for proof is disingenuous. You are asking for a meta analysis of something which might be possible but nobody would do it.
Again, I wasn't asking for proof, I was saying it's pointless to pass judgement without it. I called you out for wanting to do so without anything to back it up.
No you are disingenuously setting the bar too high. I gave at least one example of a male CEO being criticised but you are not even willing to update your beliefs slightly in face of some evidence.
No, it's not evidence in either direction, it's an anecdote.
Also, even if it was, there's actually no one criticizing Jobs in the 12 search hits in the thread, but comparing him favorably. So an unfortunate anecdote at that.
Ebay is often touted as her success credentials, but I really see it as another failure. There was no Amazon when Ebay was big. They could have BEEN Amazon.
Also she bought Skype, but forgot to check that the IP was actually included in the purchase.
I am honestly astonished she is seen in an even minimally positive light these days.
Wow, I wasn’t aware of the Skype IP battle [1]. In that case EBay licensed the underlying IP from the founders.
It is especially interesting in the context of quibi because it appears that most of their content deals allowed the content creators to own the underlying content but require a 2 year exclusive license to the service.
it was less a matter of experience, but rather hunger. she wasn't solving a problem she felt for herself (how many shows did she watch on her phone for pleasure?), which then practically compelled her to iterate to a (self-)satisfying solution. she wanted power, esteem, and an empire instead, and she got exactly that, for however short a time.
> And the founder came from Hollywood, neither of them had real founder experience.
Quibi was a disaster and Whitman was probably the wrong person to lead it — and Katzenberg the wrong person to lead the creative — but to suggest Jeffrey Katzenberg doesn’t have real founder experience is just wrong. He was a founder of what was then known as DreamWorks SKG (he’s the K) and its DreamWorks Animation division. DreamWorks was the most audacious studio since United Artists, and although DreamWorks Pictures ultimately failed, DreamWorks Animation lives on even now. But regardless, to say that he doesn’t have founded experience is flat wrong. He co-founded one of the most high-profile media companies of the last thirty years.
Quibi was a disaster and we can all have a good laugh at how much it missed the mark but Katzenberg is a founder — and I would argue a damn good one — and one of the most successful producers in Hollywood history.
I disagree. Katzenberg is who he is because of what he did for Disney Animation. The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and Lion King.
Yes, he did well with dreamworks animation but that was much more a Hollywood studio focused on content than a technology product. It just happened to require a lot of good tech.
He’s a creative producer of long form content with a ton of Hollywood cachet that is the opposite of what upstart mobile video is today.
The other letters in SKG, Spielberg and Geffen seem to know better than to wade into tech.
Only time software or app appears on their Wikipedia entries is a 1989 collaboration and an article about Geffen blocking public beach access.
I get why a mogul like Katzenberg would want to try at the app game, others have before him. But I am not surprised he’d fail to be successful with this company.
If anyone is interested in learning about Katzenberg and some of the insane power politics from his time at Disney, I recommend The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the New Hollywood.
> Yes, he did well with dreamworks animation but that was much more a Hollywood studio focused on content than a technology product. It just happened to require a lot of good tech.
I am not seeing the distinction, personally, I'd love some more input on this. The tech they built was their moat, from my understanding, and one of the reasons they could deliver on their creative vision in a way that few other companies did?
The point is dreamworks animation was not a tech startup the way Quibi was.
Dreamworks had large Babe Ruth level swings and to some extent got very lucky with chance.
Mike Meyers was not the original voice of Shrek. It was Chris Farley, who played an entirely different character. Farley died and much of the film had to be redone. While Farley was a star, he wasn’t well and there’s no telling the movie would have been a hit like it was under Meyers. Without the early success of Shrek a moat would have been over-engineering.
Quibi looked like they thought it would operate under similar forces, runaway successful content made cheaply.
When in fact the medium of delivery and matching algorithms are more powerful than smash content. Worrying about and being good at the former is just not like what Dreamworks did.
I think the founding theory behind Quibi was that is wasn't supposed to be a tech startup. It was a media/content start up. We largely consider Netflix a tech startup, but their technology has two main areas: distribution and recommendations. The rest of their business (and likely the larger fraction) is in content production and procurement.
Quibi wasn't supposed to be a tech startup, it was all about the content. This was their primary expertise and focus. Their main differentiating factor was that they were creating content for mobile consumption.
It may well be that the rapid changes in media consumption due to Covid had a major part of their downfall. That and TikTok. It's hard to compete against free, mobile-first, viral content.
I wouldn't characterize Katzenberg as a founder in the 'startup founder' sense we're used to talking about here on HN. DreamWorks was essentially built to do exactly what he had already been doing at Disney: Make and/or distribute big blockbuster films. Film production is a pretty standardized thing, as is distribution, so if you know how to make movies then you can just plug into the distribution ecosystem and off you go!
Building and distributing apps is, however, not a consistently repeatable solved problem. Unlike movies, scale, budget, stars, and connections don't dramatically increase your chances of success... even if the content is great.
So no, I don't think Katzenberg has the type of "founder" experience that would naturally give him an advantage in learning how to understand a market that he has no experience with.
Tangentially, I was just looking at Dreamworks' filmography, and it's VERY impressive. My mind is specifically blown, though, that Steven Spielberg released Minority Report and Catch Me If You Can six months apart in the same year. That is... pretty incredible.
Its seems that Minority Report was in the can from July 2001 though you could imagine the amount of post-production required for that movie which would lead to it being released almost a year later. Catch Me If You Can was filmed between February and May 2002 to be released on December 25th. It seems like a busy year but doable,
Spielberg only stepped in to direct after Gore Verbinski dropped out because the film was delayed due to DiCaprio working on Gangs of New York. Verbinski's original casting had James Gandolfini as Hanratty and Ed Harris as Frank Sr. Verbinski ended up doing The Ring instead. Its amazing how much of Hollywood production is a string of almosts and conflicting schedules.
The guiding principle of a service offering a library of content is CHOICE.
Spotify, Netflix, Amazon - all did reasonably well against competitors since they offered more choices to the user.
They built a service that deliberately imposes limitations based on platform - leaving users unable to access whatever already severely limited content library it offers.
It doesn't take business experience or even any education to spot this disaster from a mile away. So I am a bit puzzled as to what these leaders were thinking.
I've been at hp through the Whitman years and I would characterize it as stabilizing a gigantic mess her predecessors left behind. Certainly not a visionary but I feel like she did an okay job, for the employees at least.
How are you using the word “legendary”? It seems like Whitman has had one okay thing and three failures. EBay being okay. Though the company is pretty small now and never expanded out of its core feature. Skype ordeal cost billions and was ridiculous.
Her record breaking campaign, HPQ, and Quibi are all negatives.
If she had at least one for sure success, that’d be one thing.
Content services have thrived or not based on their content library.
So flying directly in the face of that and assuming you could carve out a niche based on a "time of day"/"behavior" thing alone seems very daring, especially when you're still spending an unimaginable amount of $$ on content that you'll need to pay back soon.
The swing and a miss on the consumption model crippled the ability of the content to stand on its own and give them any other chance...
That’s how they explained it, and yet what they were actually trying to build was something that, like it or not, would compete primarily with short-form mobile content in YouTube, Facebook, tiktok, etc. And I’m pretty sure people sit around on the couch scrolling through that content for hours.
If you reframe it from "people on the bus/train or sitting behind a register with nobody in line" to "bored people looking for small bursts of entertainment who only have access to a smartphone" it looks a lot less niche.
Except those people will most often prefer to go watch a minute-long video on YouTube or an even shorter TikTok clip or just scroll mindlessly through their social media of choice even if nothing new shows up. What Quibi failed to understand is that bored people on phones aren't lacking entertainment, they're just in the exact type of boredom that makes them want to do pretty much nothing.
It is exactly as crazy as it appears on the surface. Why target people on the bus/train EXCLUSIVELY when you can get money from everyone else too? The engineering cost isn't that much higher. They actively chose to paint themselves into a corner.
I actually wanted to watch the Reno 911 stuff and the Ron Funches show.... on my TV, where I watch stuff.
They played stupid games and didn't win any prizes.
They could have pivoted to people that had 5 minutes between meetings and wanted some entertainment while making a new cup of coffee. I’m pretty sure there are millions of us now.
I don't know if you were agreeing with that mentality, but that is a deeply confused business strategy.
There's a huge difference between "we [originally] wanted to target market segment X" vs "we will turn down easy money from market segment Y", and Quibi was doing the latter, which is not defensible. That's especially bad when X vanishes and Y increases. (Here, X = people watching on phones, Y = people watching at home.)
To be "not interested" in Y is to be not interested in money.
Now, to pre-empt an obvious reply: yes, sometimes you do want to turn down easy money from a segment Y. But that's primarily when you're promoting a niche luxury product, where usage by Y will hurt your branding long-term. It's not applicable to a product that deliberately attempts (and needs) to be mass-market, especially when it's targeting transit users and people who have to idly wait.
They made some pretty big ad spending like x months ago, I can't remember, but that's the only value I have associated with "Quibi" in my brain. I think they paid some famous celebrities to endorse.
I heard about them one other time, on HN a few months ago. I didn’t bother checking them out because they were mobile only. Other than that, nothing. No one I know has mentioned them to me even in discussion of such services and the people I’ve asked haven’t had a clue they existed. Maybe their content sucks. Maybe their choices and interface are garbage. But surely their terrible marketing was also a nail in the coffin?
Same. Heard about them once before and thought it was at least an interesting idea. However, if you've spent that much money and generated virtually zero chitchat on various social networks and places like HN, what have you been doing on the PR front?
I heard of them because I like Reno 911 and the social media algorithms probably knew that too because I watch the show on Comedy Central sometimes, and so they advertised Quibi and their Reno 911 show to me all over the place about 5 months ago.
I signed up to watch it. It just wasn't the same as the good old show I used to watch, so I unsubscribed.
I flipped through page after page after page of their other content offerings and not a single other thing looked remotely interesting to me. I tried watching a couple just because, and I got bored fast.
The pandemic is a frequent excuse for shutting down unsustainable VC-funded crap that shouldn't have existed to begin with. I am however surprised how they thought it would be believable when it comes to a media/entertainment service given that most people have more free time than ever due to the pandemic.
Yeah I find it funny that the pandemic and the competition get blamed for Quibi's utter failure to design a product anyone wants. Their "selling points" were "each new episode is only a few minutes, you can only watch it on your phone, and we pan-&-scan it into portrait mode for you." Nobody wanted any of those things — they actively make the product worse.
Yeah, go ahead and dictate to users the exact manner in which they must interact with your product. Don't allow any alternatives. This is what happens.
I had a similar experience recently when my phone broke and many services wouldn't work on my older phone, or older iPad, even in the browser. The worst offender was HBO Max which also flat out refuses to run on linux. I had to cancel it because I'm not going to buy a streaming service to exclusively use on my work laptop.
Does anyone remember when we made websites with the goal of as many people using them as possible? streaming video has been mainstream for over a decade, yet everyone still fucks it up.
The Verge article on this raised the point that shortform video is a crowded market with TikTok, YouTube, etc. which I'd agree is probably what crowded Quibi out. I've just started a YouTube Premium subscription and expect I'll continue paying for that once the free trial ends, whereas even at half the price, Quibi just didn't have the content or familiarity to get my money at the end of the trial.
One thing I do have to commend Quibi for, however, is how well they reversioned their video content. I think they will be seen as a little ahead of the competition there (possibly before their time). Against other content houses that will have significantly more footage to get through (and/or less resources for this task).
I think the different versions (e.g. portrait/landscape for Quibi) will be a little way off being that common. I expect computer vision tooling will enable it more broadly when it can at least expedite the process considerably (which probably isn't a huge distance off although then the blocker is organisational processes around publishing video).
Short-form social media is a booming and crowded market. Short-form video is not.
In the former case it's mostly social media, the main value here is memes and/or following creators/influencers; there is never a storyline or a "show" to follow per-se.
Quibi's business model would be that people would not only be interested in a storyline contained within bite-sized chunks of video but that they would actually pay for it. This is a flawed idea; when it comes to a story people want it to go as long as possible (and the pause button is a thing that exists already), there's no reason to want artificially-constrained storylines when you can get the longform equivalent on Netflix for the same price.
I actually do think there is a market for bite-sized chunks of video with a unifying storyline. There's a reason that all tv show episodes aren't just one long episode. So why not push the boundaries of that and break up a normal tv show episode into smaller ones?
It seems there are 3 different types of videos with decreasing segment (or episode) lengths: movies, tv shows, bite-sized shows. Each has its own place for user needs. I think sometimes people don't want to (or don't have time) watch a full movie, so they opt for a tv episode. Similarly, sometimes they don't want to watch a full tv episode.
The "Some More News" channel on YouTube had a detailed piece on Quibi some time ago which does well at explaining the context of all of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihFePUknSIc
There were so many things wrong with Quibi, just off the top of my head:
- Initially restricting allowed devices to mobile only.
- Flagrant nepotism, like Reese Witherspoon being given $6 million to narrate a documentary miniseries...with her husband coincidentally being the Head of Talent Acquisition at Quibi.
- Seemingly not having a single critically-acclaimed show. Quibi's strategy was seemingly to just dump money on A-list actors, not A-list writers and it made all of the shows (or at least the dozen I sampled) a wasted effort.
- (Allegedly) stealing the video-rotation technology from another company, and being mired in a lawsuit about it.
Also just blatantly stealing show ideas from YouTube creators instead of just... you know, hiring that YouTube channel to do something they've been doing for a decade (https://twitter.com/E_I_T/status/1247221678712619008). Even the damn title of the series and aesthetics are exactly the same.
Also the idea of dropping one episode every week. Imagine being invested in some story and only receiving 8-10 min of it every week. That's twice as short as any TV show out there, not to mention Netflix releasing entire seasons at once.
Also preventing users from taking screenshots, which is just stupid. It just helps if people share your content to other people.
> Also just blatantly stealing show ideas from YouTube creators
Wow, had no idea about this. Despicable conduct.
> Also preventing users from taking screenshots
Ah yeah, I forgot to mention this point too. Talk about shooting themselves in the foot.
Really, when all these missteps are stacked up, how was anyone thinking that this company wouldn't fail? I know hind sight is 20/20, but these all should have been immediate red flags.
> Imagine being invested in some story and only receiving 8-10 min of it every week
I agree with all your points except this one. Rick and Morty is essentially 20 minute episodes released weekly, after commercials. If you took out long pauses, transitions, and other filling, I'm sure you could get it down to 15 minutes of punch. I'd add a lot of video creators like game of zones, alt-shift-x, theinternethistorian, also fill the punch of 15-25 minute content released weekly/monthly, are ravenously popular.
There is room for ~10-20 minute content but it may be harder to market/monetize.
They launched in a kind of weird way. One would think that if they raised 2B they would start really small and test their hypothesis with a few marquee shows, and then iterate to find a product that meets the tastes and demands of the consumer. Instead it feels like they just made a lot of assumptions and built a sophisticated expensive end product ... and consumers didn't show up.
It's hard to know exactly what about Quibi failed.
Argument 1: No one wants short-form video. YouTube has been the master at this market, TikTok too! I think there is plenty of space for more short-form content.
Argument 2: No one wants to pay for streaming content. Netflix and Hulu have plenty of varying length content that people willingly pay for.
Ultimately, Quibi itself was weird. Correct me if I'm wrong, but their marketing strategy was, high end short form content, code for Hollywooy-esque content. There's nothing wrong with this style of content, but when I watch something short-form, I expect it to keep my attention when I'm actively holding my phone.
YouTube and TikTok content are both edited to be high paced and leave little room for air. That keeps it engaging when you're on your phone because you just can't look away. If I wanted to relax after a long day, I want to sit on the couch and turn on the TV. That's where typical Hollywood content fits in. Lots of space in between spoken dialog, music, and more reflective pacing.
Quibi tried to give you TV pacing, but short-form format and ultimately that was rejected in the market.
Why on earth didn't they test this thesis before blowing through a billion dollars?
I feel Katzenberg over estimates how much people care about big celebrity names, their entire focus was "how many celebrities can we cram into our shows", rather than making the stories/content compelling. The obnoxious advertising of celebrities being like "Hey look at me!" only signaled how shallow and bad their content must be.
Celebs often let their success go to their head thinking they're the reason why movies they have been in were successful. But the real reason a movie is successful has more to do with directing, writing, editing and all of the background work that was put into it.
Why subscribe to Quibi to see Celebs embarrass themselves with cringe content, when you can see them do that on instagram for free!
oh man I agree. Most of the content was utter crap. A few shows were really excellent but there was a ton of hapless “big star” plus cheap comedy or lame variety shown. T-mobile gave it for free, had it not I would not have paid a dime. The Shape of Pasta was an outstanding travel/foodie show in same vane as Anthony Bordain’s show. A few of the thrillers were good and that’s about it.
I must say... I've seen their ads a lot on YouTube and I had no idea their format and business model was fundamentally different from Netflix. I thought - ok, another Netflix...
Reading the comments I can see it was mobile-only and short episodes targeted at people riding public transport (or similar short duration where what you can do is very limited and you want to entertain yourself).
Everyone keeps saying they were optimised for vertical videos. No, they weren’t, they had normal horizontal videos that they cropped the sides off in vertical, and it obvious from their own marketing stuff that the video weren’t shot with this cropping in mind. The experience would have been shit.
Second, they didn’t create short episodes for quick watching, they created full length movies and just carved them up, again this was obvious from their own marketing stuff.
Am I the only one who never heard of Quibi until today? I feel like I'm in their target market yet I've never heard their name until I saw them in the news.
Maybe, I'm being somewhat superficial but I can't help to wonder that the name of the company/app "Quibi" only hurt their launch and not helped aside from other factors pointed out.
I wonder how many times in talking about the app have people needed to spell it out or say it's pronounced like "kwibee" not "keebee", etc. I actually needed to go to wikipedia.org to see the exact pronunciation.
So much about the branding reminds me of the "Cuil" search engine failure a decade ago. I remember seeing the original name "Cuill" in some of my request logs and thinking at the time that it was some malicious DDOS bot that wanted to see my site as "see you ill". First time that I saw in the news about "Quibi" I immediately thought of the whole "Cuil" search engine failure. Not a great first impression, but that it was.
I also think the strange name had an effect. Whenever I read about it, first I didn't know how it was pronounced, nor what it was exactly, nor why I would care. The ads would show someone watching a video and laughing, but... we already have other video services, so why was this any different?
Anyway, you could say we now all know how it's pronounced. As of today "Quibi" is pronounced dead.
What a colossal waste of money on a lazy, uninspired, and half-assed concept. Always so frustrating to see hundreds of millions blown on nonsense like this when there are truly innovative startups that would do so much more with that money.
Perhaps bottom-up approaches are better: build something you really think is fun, then monetize it later. Social networking (facebook), picture-sharing (snap and Instagram), video sharing (youTube). Having a bunch of corporate executives dictating a feature set from the too-down is less successful.
> The company spent aggressively to develop its content. Its lineup of star-studded programming included a court show featuring Chrissy Teigen, a romantic comedy with Anna Kendrick ...
Sounds like top shelf content, let's try a review:
"My most recent pick was Dummy, a show where Anna Kendrick becomes friends with her boyfriend’s sex doll. When I turned my phone horizontally, suddenly I could see a widescreen version of the same series: The sex doll’s legs splayed further along the floor, and in the background I could now see Donal Logue, the actor who plays the boyfriend. ... The episode of Dummy lasted six minutes, just long enough for me to think, What is this?, when I realized that the boyfriend was a barely fictionalized version of Emmy-winning TV writer Dan Harmon. Then it ended."
"“Dummy” is a semi-autobiographical comedy from Cody Heller, whom Kendrick plays, with Donal Logue portraying her real-life partner Dan Harmon, the Emmy-winning showrunner of “Community” and “Rick & Morty.” The 10-episode series sees Cody imagining that her boyfriend’s sex doll is sentient and high jinks ensue. It is breezy viewing at an average of seven minutes apiece, but the show deserves Emmy recognition for how its frames are so deliberately composed in service of advancing the art form. Relatively few shows contend for Best Short Form Comedy/Drama Series; that the category exists is a testament to the academy’s continual acknowledgement of the evolution of television, which “Dummy” embodies."
One of the most poorly executed ideas I have seen. The idea itself was workshopped and feels forced. I wouldn't have picked that to begin with. They just didn't know what people want.
A more resilient version of Quibi has been operating in Japan for 5 years. It's called "C Channel"[1], founded by the founder of the LINE messaging app Akira Morikawa. C Channel also presents short videos in vertical format. It differs from Quibi that they have narrowed their target viewer on young women who want makeup tutorials. Their production cost is probably cheaper: they feature influencers instead of A-list celebrities. They started small, and still serve that specific niche for women who want to be fashionable.
Quibi may have fared better if they likewise focused on a specific niche of viewers.
Everyone here is talking about the business model, but how about the actual content?
Every single article I read about Quibi before today was about how bad their series are. And while I haven't seen a single show myself, the worst offenders do seem like the type of trash that made people run away from regular TV to begin with. Chrissy's Court, Gayme show, Murder House Flip...
I imagine you can make a bad idea work with good content, and you can make bad content work with a good, convenient platform. But I suppose there is not much you can do when the entire internet is complaining about both of them.
Imagine having a better opportunity than the global pandemic to launch a streaming service crammed with original content and then missing the shot completely...
"Quibi made their “episodes” 11 minutes to avoid paying union writers. Everyone should MC Hammer dance on their grave."
"By playing credits between each act, instead of commercials, Quibi claimed a 10 episode season was actually 40 “low budget under 12 minute episodes”, allowing them to skirt SAG (actors union) and WGA (writers union) minimums. They were a scab-based business model."
I tried the free trial of Quibi and actually liked a lot of the content on there. Not enough though to pay for an extra streaming service. I hope with the sale though that somehow the content moves to another platform.
is it just me or did anyone just not get what was different about them? i had a debate with some yesterday trying to justify why them over netflix or any other existing streaming service for that matter and they couldn't, i couldn't either.
I think Quibi did a lot wrong, but I do think there's some truth that the ubiquitous "traditional" TV segment is just waiting to be disrupted.
I don't sit down to watch shows for 30 minutes. Sometimes I'll binge for 2 hours and get 4 different rising-action-falling-action cycles and 4 different cliffhangers trying to keep me on for the next episode, which I was planning on doing anyways.
Sometimes I'll watch for 45 minutes, get halfway through a second episode but have to shut it off for one reason or another, and when I come back the next day I feel disoriented because the plot cycle is built to assume an uninterrupted segment.
I don't think the solution here is 10 minute episodes per se, but I think the flow of storytelling in modern TV series is waiting for some innovation to bring it to the 21st century.
A great example of innovation in storytelling is the Witcher 3. Everytime I boot the game up, during the loading sequence I get a 15 second voiced over "recap" where Geralt informs me about where the main storyline is and what we need to do next, whereas in traditional TV segments I'm given a recap every 30 minutes of progress regardless of where in the show I start and stop watching.
Good riddance. I wanted to watch it on my Apple TV and they didn't make it happen until my trial ran out. Oh well! I hope the content will be available elsewhere in the future.
Not to sound harsh but the company just seemed to have the wrong leadership making the wrong decisions at the wrong time. Failing with a well capitalized streaming service during a pandemic is a bit like failing to sell ice cold lemonade to people in the desert. Sure there are probably other players, but if you’re not at least doing reasonably well then you’re probably doing something terribly wrong.
Would a movie studio work if it moved to san francisco and just tried to make it work. This was people thinking something really difficult and risky was really easy and safe. Its not.
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