The Netflix autoplay feature led to “by far the biggest increase in the hours watched KPI of any feature we ever tested,” according to the engineer who created it. Different timings were tested – 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 15 seconds – but 10 seconds turned out to be the sweet spot. Just enough time to catch your breath, but not too long to lose interest.
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Netflix now charges £4.99 a month for weekly shows with ad breaks. Sound familiar?
Reed Hastings, with no prior experience of the film and television industry, applied the gym-model of subscription to movie rentals to create Netflix.
Reed Hastings decided to start Netflix after being fined $40 at a Blockbuster store for being late to return a copy of Apollo 13.
Netflix shows are not made equal. As the company’s recent viewing report states, “the top 1 percent of titles accounted for about 22.32 billion hours of viewing, almost 24 percent of the total. The top 10 percent brought in 68 percent of all viewing – 64.16 billion hours.”
In 1985, thousands of blind taste tests showed that consumers preferred a new, sweeter formulation of Coca Cola. The company took this at face value, replacing the original Coca Cola with a new drink using the sweeter recipe. But the ensuing backlash to New Coke shows the limitations of objective thinking. Insiders forgot that, in the real world, people don’t consume drinks blindfolded. The data ignored the strength of the original Coca Cola brand.
When Trinity Mirror media group asked consumers what they wanted from a newspaper, they said articles that were upbeat, optimistic and politically neutral. But when the group launched New Day – a newspaper that offered exactly that – readership was so low that the paper shut down within just 2 months.
According to a (rather old) longitudinal study, only 40% of people have stuck to their resolutions after 6 months. The issue is not knowing how to quit smoking or exercise more – it’s taking the steps to do so.
NYT is now a gaming company – users spend more time playing games (like Wordle) than reading news.
The NYT’s purchase of Wordle, as Shane O Leary puts it, had a “rising tide lifts all boats effect on their gaming vertical.” It brought in tens of millions of people to the app and doubled the number of weekly users for non Wordle games.
Nickel, a French bank, wanted to provide financial services to low-income people but couldn’t afford to open branches everywhere. So the company used corners of existing cafés and tobacconists, which not only saved money but also provided instant reach and scale. Nickel now has 7,500 of these points of sale as well as 2.5 million customers.
Nike started out as a running shoe manufacturer, long before it ventured into casual shoes and apparel. As co-founder Phil Knight explains, “we just tried to get our shoes on the feet of runners… we thought the world stopped and started in the lab and everything revolved around the product.”
When the brand pursued a DTC model, and ended hundreds of long term partnerships with retailers, it quickly realised the importance of mass distribution: many light buyers couldn’t find Nike products in their usual stores and simply didn’t buy them. Sales declined 8% in 2024.
Yet, as John Long points out, we’re spending more on books than ever before. And before you ask, there has been close to zero book inflation in the same period (i.e. prices have stayed the same).
Nobel Prize winners, scientific geniuses in their own fields, are known to have scientifically questionable views in other fields. Alfred Russel Wallace, codiscoverer of the theory of natural selection, advocated spiritualism and believed that nonmaterial forces explained the evolution of the human mind. Percival Lowell, a pioneer in planetary astronomy, was convinced that he had discovered martian canals of intelligent origin.