Turns out infinite growth isn't possible and consumers will move on when a service becomes stale.
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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What is it with the obsession with infinite growth for every company anyways? Why can’t they be happy with a stable, still extremely high, income? The people at the top already have more money than they need but still want more for no reason
Because capitalism is broken. It's predicated on increasing share price. This means a functional company regularly making good stable income based on consistent product is a failure, because share price becomes stable if income and production remain stable.
Not really broken if that's always been it's core tenet. It's working as designed.
It's broken because infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible.
Sure, in reality. Capitalism isn't designed around reality.
So it's broken. Because it doesn't work in reality.
It's functioning exactly as designed. That's not broken.
Wouldn't the share price follow inflation, and wouldn't the stock holders keep getting dividends that themselves follow inflation? I'd say that a stagnant company can still be profitable. But yeah, there's greed and people expecting to make fast, big earnings by buying low and selling high...
Infinite growth is also impossible as there are only so many people on this planet, and even less that are able to afford these services.
Because public corporations are absolutely beholden to one goal: (eventually) returning a profit to investors.
Why can’t they be happy with a stable, still extremely high, income?
Shareholders. If you buy a share of a company for $5, you expect it to go up in value so you can make money from your investment.
Any publicly traded company must (by law!) try to maximize profit beyond what they're already doing, to satisfy shareholders. They could be sued if they don't.
It's capitalism. Driving the economy by profit means that each company has to race to obtain as much profit as possible, or risk losing to their competitors who are trying to do the exact same thing.
If you read the article, Netflix gained subscribers and revenue also grew. Just not as much as shareholders were hoping for
Netflix earnings are not "down," they're just not growing as fast as The Market wants them to. This title is heavily editorialized and wrong.
This should be the number one comment, as it’s actually reflecting what the article says. I guess people just don’t like to hear it.
They can't compete anymore. They removed/lost all the good content that wasn't theirs and can barely make a quality original show or movie. Then they decided to push the password sharing bullshit on us. I canceled my account and haven't missed it one bit. I'll be sailing the high seas when it comes to anything worth a damn they make.
@reddig33 For me Netflix was good until 2015 after that they started to cancel TV series with 2 or 3 seasons without a proper story closing. Then I moved to Prime Video which was good until 2021 when they canceled Bosch just to move its sequel to Freevee (free version of Prime Video with ads).
Then again I moved to HBO, which has been nice (in terms of high quality content delivery) if it weren't for the HBO+Discovery merger. Which brings high "quality" content like the Kardashians.
That HBO discovery merger is a shit show. Love HBO. Now they’re making it harder to find stuff or outright pulling it off the site. But relentless trash can be found on the front splash page.
@1chemistdown @reddig33 In my case I'm safe, for now, the merger isn't coming to latin america until October. So I still have time to watch some TV series and movies before the real shit show begins.
After October 1st. I'm canceling HBO and probably saving to money to spending it in games. Also I'm not going to lie Humble Choice subscription looks really tempting to me. I pay for the games, I keep the games on my account even if I cancel it (the subscription).
Interestingly, the MSN version of the Reuters story is missing the info about subscriber growth coming from the cheaper markets. I originally read the Reuters piece on Apple News so I tried to find a public link to post here. The important missing pieces are:
- weaker-than-expected revenue forecast for revenue in the third quarter
- “While the company added subscribers, it said average revenue per member fell 3% from a year earlier. That was partly because many of the new sign-ups came in countries where Netflix charges lower prices.”
- “Netflix said its advertising tier remained a small part of its membership base and that current ad revenue is not material.” Cash flow will be up because production is down due to the strike.
Here’s the complete Reuters story…
Except that…. https://www.macrumors.com/2023/07/19/netflix-gains-six-million-subscribers-q2-2023/
According to Netflix, revenue is up in every region where paid sharing was introduced, and sign-ups have exceeded cancelations. The company saw revenue growth of 2.7 percent year over year. Going forward, Netflix expects revenue growth to accelerate further as it begins to see the full benefits of paid sharing and additional adoption of its ad-supported plan.
ArrFlix is better than evarr!
If you know, you know. Also, adding Ombi/Overseerr can allow you to just add something to your watchlist on Plex, and have it just show up a little while later.
It's almost like the expectation of infinite growth was a bad expectation.
Because back in the 50s everyone had a growth mindset. Rightfully so, because the population was increasing, and women went to work. Now populations are beginning to shrink, so markets are bound to shrink with it if it continues with the same mindset.
Blockbuster still rents out movies..
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