Netflix is, and always has been, first and foremost a tech company. Attention has always been their business model; "content" is simply the means of attracting it. We're witnessing end-stage enshittification of the platform and I, for one, will enjoy watching its inevitable decline with my bucket of popcorn.
I wish it was end stage enshitification. This doesn’t end as much as it just devolves into something else until they get the next market dopamine hit. Then they’ll squeeze it for all it’s worth in attempt to return to some form of glory days before realizing it was finite rather than eternal.
I am just here with my popcorns watching my iPhone and waiting for Netflix biggest blunders to show up in the news. Apparently I am their best target customer who doesn’t subscribe to them.
It’s not hard: binge model + exorbitant time between seasons. Look at pre-streaming shows like The West Wing, House, Breaking Bad: all released their episodes over several months (broadcast schedules) and the wait between seasons was always less than a year! You got to really let them sink in over multiple months and get new developments regularly. Meanwhile the final season of Stranger Things took over 3 years to release since the season prior. No wonder people stop caring about subsequent seasons: people literally forget the show exists!
Breaking Bad zoomed into the national consciousness when people could catch up on Netflix. Very few people watched the first few seasons when they were on.
Breaking Bad had steady viewership growth from season 1 through 4 and only saw a big jump in the second half of season 5. It debuted on Netflix before season 4, so I'm not sure if that was the real catalyst or if it simply gained enough of a cultural following that people were all in on catching up with what their friends were watching and it just happened to be on Netflix. Other than Hulu, was there even a legitimate competitor yet in 2011?
Netflix is garbage. May they become the MySpace of the 2020's.
YouTube Premium, on the other hand, is well worth the $14/month I spend. Some of their videos, at least , are made or chosen by real people, not Silicon Valley bros with Big Data to back them up. Classical music, history, science, classic movies: it's all there.
Plus YT Premium gets you YouTube Music included so you can also dump the overpriced Spotify subscription. YT gets you the most bang for the buck by far.
That’s a low hurdle, but since I never used MySpace I can’t compare.
The older web apps had simplicity going for them. There hadn’t been as many generations of product managers all trying to add their unique brand of slop.
Nodded and pointed at my screen several times while reading this. Hells yeah.
Netflix is not the only, ummm, content provider, who seem to think that I'm gonna remember whatever it was I watched three years ago. Currently watching House of the Dragon, and I've kind of just become resigned to the fact that I'm not going to pick up on the actual significance of parts of it. I mean, I once watched the events they're currently referring to, but man it was a long time ago.
I hate the three- or five-second countdown to next episode! Let me watch the fucking credits, plus I like that song you picked! But again, not just them.
"To visually and narratively engineer your own art to be ignored is a bizarre creative strategy"--although it was a parallel idea that led Brian Eno to invent ambient, and that worked out well, and more on point to your post, it worked out lucrative.
I think that has been a big issue for Netflix in earlier years. They made some interwsting shows then cancelled them straight away eather than give them time to settle in.
"Now, as is typical, the world seems to finally be coming around to my position". Write it on my tombstone, friend. Thanks for this -- such good insight. Binging never results in good feelings, be it nachos or poorly written shows. Writing matters. You can hire the best actors but if you give them crappy dialog and poor plot construction it's unsatisfying. Widow's Bay over on Apple proves this point -- the writing (and cast) are incredible, and waiting for a new epidode each week built community and buzz.
This. My eating disorder was at it worst binging shows. I know a lot of my hesitance to watch a show is that it’s no longer one show and I may find myself falling into old patterns when I’m bored and filled up with empty content
Having to wait a year for the next season is absurd ... especially when you know it's already been filmed. What's really annoying, though, is when a series is dropped altogether, when from the story line, you can plainly see that another season was originally intended. It would appear that the executives don't care if anyone likes the program. They have other priorities.
Yes! In combination with their business model (and dearth of good shows), this encouraged me to subscribe for a month. Binge everything I wanted to see and stop subscribing for most of the year.
Turns out running your company primarily off of "data" and "analytics" without any common sense or care about your product not only isn't a good thing, but also ultimate erodes long-term equity and the core business. (and I say this as someone who used to oversee a data & analytics group)
May depend on what the goal is. If the goal is for lots of people to make tons of money, then it's been a humongous success. If the goal was to truly entertain us- well, less success
After 12 years with Netflix we cancelled our subscription last month. Not because of the reason above - although that is making us feel even better about dropping Netflix. But because they jacked up their rates by 25% here in Spain. And when we started thinking about it, we were hardly watching any Netflix. HBO (or whatever they're called this week), Prime and especially Apple provide us with plenty of interest things to watch.
We have a mobile family. Ever since Netflix initiated that thing where everybody has to be at the same address to use an account, half the family no longer has an account. And you know what? I don’t miss it even a little bit.
I just as soon watch my feel-good British competition shows, and vintage TV, on a free channel like Roku.
I canceled once they started streaming events like NFL and WWE. Raising my rate is one thing, spending that money on Live events that used to be on regular TV was not something I am willing to support
Canceled Netflix 5 years ago, and HBO Max probably two years ago. I was just never watching them. I'd sit there on the home screen and spend 30 minutes trying to find something to watch and eventually give up. It's all slop. 🤷♂️
The only positive to HBO Max is their library of classic films. I've currently got 25-30 from the 70s or older, with 7-8 of them from before 1950. I got a great deal on the annual plan last year during Black Friday, so it's been worth it.
Often on Sunday mornings, I get a little hiccup of latent anticipation for my shows later that night - SATC, Six Feet Under, True Blood, House od Cards, Succession. No more
I read all those shows you listed at the top of your article and thought to myself, ‘Don’t have time to watch that, don’t have time to watch THAT, maybe I’ll watch THAT after the 4 other things I want to watch first…” And I actually work in the industry and therefore actually have an incentive to watch as much as possible, and yet I physically can’t. Even with Supergirl’s recent flop, I thought, “Oops, sorry I missed that. I’m traveling!” But there’s a difference between Supergirl, that I’m ok to miss, and The Odyssey, which I will wait patiently to see a week late and insist on seeing. I remember during COVID when people were watching endlessly, and Netflix wanted endless content because they wanted to be the one and only streamer you watched. But Netflix can’t complain that I have to leave the house to go to my job and that I have to turn off the TV to engage with my family and touch grass. And to your point about traditional TV being an anticipated event, even at my most busiest, I would always buckle in and clear my Sundays and Mondays to watch Once Upon A Time and The Bachelor pre-COVID.
Great post Max. I think you've captured what most of us have been feeling. Alas, it could have been something different.
So what happens next? Will they wake up and admit they’ve bottomed out? Is there a home for quality anywhere? Staring as I do at the endless scroll of content, searching for something that will bring me joy but finding little... Is this what we've been destined for?
I still believe there can be a home that we know will bring us joy, discovery, and transcendence of all sorts and not require us to searchsearchsearch. But maybe no longer will that come in my lifetime, alas...
I've always maintained that Netflix is simply a more expensive version of YouTube, except instead of user-generated stuff, they license it from others.
Except YouTube isn't paying users to make and upload stuff, keeping their costs low, unlike Netflix.
Netflix is, and always has been, first and foremost a tech company. Attention has always been their business model; "content" is simply the means of attracting it. We're witnessing end-stage enshittification of the platform and I, for one, will enjoy watching its inevitable decline with my bucket of popcorn.
Not always! They used to mail me DVDs. 😔
Yes, this is strange to re-remember - how quickly they were able to supply a person with new dvds, at a time when everyone had a dvd player.
Actually pretty impressive
I wish it was end stage enshitification. This doesn’t end as much as it just devolves into something else until they get the next market dopamine hit. Then they’ll squeeze it for all it’s worth in attempt to return to some form of glory days before realizing it was finite rather than eternal.
I am just here with my popcorns watching my iPhone and waiting for Netflix biggest blunders to show up in the news. Apparently I am their best target customer who doesn’t subscribe to them.
But there is nothing going back to, jobs destroyed, slop is the king
It’s not hard: binge model + exorbitant time between seasons. Look at pre-streaming shows like The West Wing, House, Breaking Bad: all released their episodes over several months (broadcast schedules) and the wait between seasons was always less than a year! You got to really let them sink in over multiple months and get new developments regularly. Meanwhile the final season of Stranger Things took over 3 years to release since the season prior. No wonder people stop caring about subsequent seasons: people literally forget the show exists!
And the actors visibly age between seasons. No small thing, especially when the actors started out as young characters.
Yeah this is such a weird externality considering the speed of everything else these days
Also highly formulaic and eventually even slower people realise they are essentially watching the same show over and over again.
Breaking Bad zoomed into the national consciousness when people could catch up on Netflix. Very few people watched the first few seasons when they were on.
Breaking Bad had steady viewership growth from season 1 through 4 and only saw a big jump in the second half of season 5. It debuted on Netflix before season 4, so I'm not sure if that was the real catalyst or if it simply gained enough of a cultural following that people were all in on catching up with what their friends were watching and it just happened to be on Netflix. Other than Hulu, was there even a legitimate competitor yet in 2011?
Season 1 - 1.23 million
Season 2 - 1.31 million
Season 3 - 1.52 million
Season 4 - 1.87 million
Season 5 part 1 - 2.59 million
Season 5 part 2 - 6.04 million
Netflix is garbage. May they become the MySpace of the 2020's.
YouTube Premium, on the other hand, is well worth the $14/month I spend. Some of their videos, at least , are made or chosen by real people, not Silicon Valley bros with Big Data to back them up. Classical music, history, science, classic movies: it's all there.
My brother tried to get me to subscribe to YouTube Premium and i wasn't having it, but this article, and your comment, pushed me over the edge.
I think that user generated content can be amazingly creative… it’ll be interesting to see the next tiers in the platform evolution
Plus YT Premium gets you YouTube Music included so you can also dump the overpriced Spotify subscription. YT gets you the most bang for the buck by far.
Myspace was way better than Facebook however, just to put that out there.
That’s a low hurdle, but since I never used MySpace I can’t compare.
The older web apps had simplicity going for them. There hadn’t been as many generations of product managers all trying to add their unique brand of slop.
As a previous YouTube premium member, where tf are you getting this $14 number? They raised it to $22 now.
Mine seems to be $16. I checked my credit card records.
Mine is $17.31 ($15.99) after tax.
The annual plan is $159.99 before tax, so just under $14.
There's a family plan that's $27/mo.
They don't have any plan that's $22.
Who do you think owns YT?
I guess you think that's clever.
First of all, I worked at Google and visited YouTube a couple times.
Secondly, no one was talking about Google here.
So sit down.
Thirdly, if you worked at Google, that means you facilitated evil, and should lay down in a box.
🤣🤣🤣🤡
You just convinced me to get it x
The Rest is History. 100s of episodes.
They do read commercials at the start, but it’s easy to Mute those.
MySpace was actually good.
Nodded and pointed at my screen several times while reading this. Hells yeah.
Netflix is not the only, ummm, content provider, who seem to think that I'm gonna remember whatever it was I watched three years ago. Currently watching House of the Dragon, and I've kind of just become resigned to the fact that I'm not going to pick up on the actual significance of parts of it. I mean, I once watched the events they're currently referring to, but man it was a long time ago.
I hate the three- or five-second countdown to next episode! Let me watch the fucking credits, plus I like that song you picked! But again, not just them.
"To visually and narratively engineer your own art to be ignored is a bizarre creative strategy"--although it was a parallel idea that led Brian Eno to invent ambient, and that worked out well, and more on point to your post, it worked out lucrative.
Good point re: Eno!
I’m sick of investing time watching a series and it ends on a cliff hanger and then the next season is cancelled!
I think that has been a big issue for Netflix in earlier years. They made some interwsting shows then cancelled them straight away eather than give them time to settle in.
Totally. Every season that comes out requires me to rewatch the old seasons so I just never have time for it and prioritize other content instead
"Now, as is typical, the world seems to finally be coming around to my position". Write it on my tombstone, friend. Thanks for this -- such good insight. Binging never results in good feelings, be it nachos or poorly written shows. Writing matters. You can hire the best actors but if you give them crappy dialog and poor plot construction it's unsatisfying. Widow's Bay over on Apple proves this point -- the writing (and cast) are incredible, and waiting for a new epidode each week built community and buzz.
Yes! I lovedddd widows bay omg.
This. My eating disorder was at it worst binging shows. I know a lot of my hesitance to watch a show is that it’s no longer one show and I may find myself falling into old patterns when I’m bored and filled up with empty content
I totally get this.
Having to wait a year for the next season is absurd ... especially when you know it's already been filmed. What's really annoying, though, is when a series is dropped altogether, when from the story line, you can plainly see that another season was originally intended. It would appear that the executives don't care if anyone likes the program. They have other priorities.
Yes! In combination with their business model (and dearth of good shows), this encouraged me to subscribe for a month. Binge everything I wanted to see and stop subscribing for most of the year.
Turns out running your company primarily off of "data" and "analytics" without any common sense or care about your product not only isn't a good thing, but also ultimate erodes long-term equity and the core business. (and I say this as someone who used to oversee a data & analytics group)
Reducing human experience to data has its limitations!
May depend on what the goal is. If the goal is for lots of people to make tons of money, then it's been a humongous success. If the goal was to truly entertain us- well, less success
After 12 years with Netflix we cancelled our subscription last month. Not because of the reason above - although that is making us feel even better about dropping Netflix. But because they jacked up their rates by 25% here in Spain. And when we started thinking about it, we were hardly watching any Netflix. HBO (or whatever they're called this week), Prime and especially Apple provide us with plenty of interest things to watch.
We have a mobile family. Ever since Netflix initiated that thing where everybody has to be at the same address to use an account, half the family no longer has an account. And you know what? I don’t miss it even a little bit.
I just as soon watch my feel-good British competition shows, and vintage TV, on a free channel like Roku.
I canceled once they started streaming events like NFL and WWE. Raising my rate is one thing, spending that money on Live events that used to be on regular TV was not something I am willing to support
Canceled Netflix 5 years ago, and HBO Max probably two years ago. I was just never watching them. I'd sit there on the home screen and spend 30 minutes trying to find something to watch and eventually give up. It's all slop. 🤷♂️
The only positive to HBO Max is their library of classic films. I've currently got 25-30 from the 70s or older, with 7-8 of them from before 1950. I got a great deal on the annual plan last year during Black Friday, so it's been worth it.
They must be worried. The reboot of Little House features a white family.
Often on Sunday mornings, I get a little hiccup of latent anticipation for my shows later that night - SATC, Six Feet Under, True Blood, House od Cards, Succession. No more
I read all those shows you listed at the top of your article and thought to myself, ‘Don’t have time to watch that, don’t have time to watch THAT, maybe I’ll watch THAT after the 4 other things I want to watch first…” And I actually work in the industry and therefore actually have an incentive to watch as much as possible, and yet I physically can’t. Even with Supergirl’s recent flop, I thought, “Oops, sorry I missed that. I’m traveling!” But there’s a difference between Supergirl, that I’m ok to miss, and The Odyssey, which I will wait patiently to see a week late and insist on seeing. I remember during COVID when people were watching endlessly, and Netflix wanted endless content because they wanted to be the one and only streamer you watched. But Netflix can’t complain that I have to leave the house to go to my job and that I have to turn off the TV to engage with my family and touch grass. And to your point about traditional TV being an anticipated event, even at my most busiest, I would always buckle in and clear my Sundays and Mondays to watch Once Upon A Time and The Bachelor pre-COVID.
This is a really great article.
Thanks!
Great post Max. I think you've captured what most of us have been feeling. Alas, it could have been something different.
So what happens next? Will they wake up and admit they’ve bottomed out? Is there a home for quality anywhere? Staring as I do at the endless scroll of content, searching for something that will bring me joy but finding little... Is this what we've been destined for?
I still believe there can be a home that we know will bring us joy, discovery, and transcendence of all sorts and not require us to searchsearchsearch. But maybe no longer will that come in my lifetime, alas...
I've always maintained that Netflix is simply a more expensive version of YouTube, except instead of user-generated stuff, they license it from others.
Except YouTube isn't paying users to make and upload stuff, keeping their costs low, unlike Netflix.
Great piece!
Thanks!