And for the big guns, it means they make up the viewer stats and can say 2 billion people watched a show and by the time they have to "pay" the artists for those 2 billion eyeballs, they're not going to.
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Sure, the people at the very top will be "fine," but they're also buying into their own shelf-life and diminishing the overall ability for almost all other artists to join in profit sharing (again, the no union backend is the real killer).
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Point is this: the nielsens were a wonky system for a million reasons I don't have time to get into (I mean, the studios were the ones paying them soooo) but having an even semi-democratic reporting system on artistic success was critical. Same goes for box office.
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Because it provides the single most important factor of leverage for artists and unions to find some stake in their own success.
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But in a world where everything is turning to streaming and subscription models, the company cash flow now has nothing to do with your given success, so they paint you one way or the other to help their $$$ side.
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I understand some of what I'm saying is generalization and there's a lot of little finicky points in this. There are people are genuine damn experts in all of it (and fighting accordingly). But this is absolutely the broad strokes of what is happening.
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What's hilarious is the studios would have LOVED to have this years ago because it meant they wouldn't have to have shared backend, etc. But now we're undoing basically everything those artists and unions fought for.
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"But but but please tell me it's good for consumers?" Sorry, it just means your favorite shows are going to get cancelled more and for less good reasons. Also movies don't make economic sense for streamers soooooooo not looking great on that front either.
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Who is this ultimately good for? The answer, like most late stage capitalist developments, is always just the major streaming companies and that's it. So it may just seem like numbers reporting, but it's part of the ever-widening, horrifying jaw of the haves and have nots. END
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Replying to @FilmCritHULK
what’s also interesting is that the numbers being reported just seem so insane and don’t pass the laugh test *and yet* because we’ve been locked in our homes for a year with nothing to do, such huge numbers could be argued to have some legitimacy.
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That's the thing that boggles my mind, right? Like the ability to put something on the front page of netflix is the biggest no cost marketing coup in history. One button, click, you watch. No barriers. But I swear that's also the thing that makes passive watch / exit just as easy
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Replying to @FilmCritHULK
I would love to see some kind of study on how random movies have done on Netflix when they’ve been heavily featured by the algorithm vis a vis how they performed in theaters/EST/traditional home video. But we can’t access that data, which leads us back to the initial thesis!
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Replying to @mumphrey @FilmCritHULK
like, if something like Nightcrawler ends up on the main splash page, does it get I dunno, 20 million viewers per Netflix? if Nightcrawler had that many tickets sold at an average price of just $8, that’s $160 million in box office! is that what they’re trying to sell us here?
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