8% is not a terrible conversion rate at all, and they’ve only just started. I’m not a Quibi user and have no vested interest in them either way but this is the third different article I’ve seen in the last week or 2 talking about how terrible they’re doing and now they’re about to crash and burn, because of an 8% conversion?
Comparing them to Disney is ridiculous too, it’s Disney! With multiple generations obsessed with their library and people literally counting down the days until their launch, they got a 10% conversion... but 8% is horrible and the end of Quibi?
I work in this industry and generally agree with your assessment.
However a few things, the general industry perspective went like this:
1. David Katzenberg and Meg Whitman were creating a consumer service targeting a demographic they don't fit in a field they've not worked in. (Consumer apps for a younger demographic)
2. They got 1.8 Billion in funding. For fuck's sake you should get one breakout hit piece of content from that. (Note Apple is struggling a bit with this one too). With the funding, hype and content they've spent on the expectations are going to be pretty damn astronomical, they brought high expectations on themselves.
3. Their entire premise was based on this concept of quick bites of content. With an almost 2 billion dollar war chest the right thing to do would have been to test this theory maybe? Roll out a single show first, backfilled with some news? Get some feedback maybe?
Quibi is led by some serious heavy hitters, so its not spoken much out loud but I think a lot of folks in the industry felt this play was based mostly on hubris and now there's a certain sense of schadenfreude as they start to flail.
Apple, Quibi, Amazon are trying to plan the perfect breakout show.
It doesn’t work like that. A lot of the networks’s and Netflix’s breakout shows were not planned to be great. That’s why they just greenlight a bunch of random pilots and see what sticks to the wall.
> It doesn’t work like that. A lot of the networks’s and Netflix’s breakout shows were not planned to be great. That’s why they just greenlight a bunch of random pilots and see what sticks to the wall.
There's a great interview with Bryan Cranston, where he's talking about the origins of "Breaking Bad."
Basically AMC wanted to compete with HBO, but they didn't have HBO money. So they gave the creators a limited budget but a lot more creative freedom. AMC basically created an environment where creative people who had a passion project could get it off the ground if they were willing to work for less money.
In particular, Vince Gilligan had to go to the mat for Bryan Cranston, because AMC wanted Gilligan to cast someone else.
This may not be relevant at all to the topic at hand, but they also made concessions for their budget (which HBO likely does, too). The pilot was written for East LA where nearby JPL was where his former founders worked. They shot the series in New Mexico because of the film subsidies. Many shows may not have been green-lit without subsidies.
> It doesn’t work like that. A lot of the networks’s and Netflix’s breakout shows were not planned to be great.
That might be true for a lot of breakout shows, but not all of them. House of Cards was arguably Netflix' first breakout show, and Netflix outbid other networks for House of Cards when they were just starting to focus on original programming. That was always painted in showbiz media as a very deliberate plan based on Netflix' data about their users' preferences.
We know now that they didn’t really have that data at the time. They just heard Fincher was available and bought his idea unseen for a lot of money so no one else could get to propose to him.
Netflix pinning a lot on winning a bidding war for Fincher sound suspiciously like investors placing massively outsized bets on the Dreamworks/Disney guy with the startup savvy CEO being the Next Big Thing in digital media...
House of Cards was an adaptation of a widely acclaimed British TV show, directed by one of the best Hollywood directors, starring an A-list actor. Plus it probably didn't cost 1.8 billion.
Yep, entirely different risk profile. Netflix already had a brand, platform, and customers, and they already offered TV shows and weren't experimenting with a new format. The House of Cards risk was all in execution, not brand, concept, product, talent, etc.
Actually they are all based on the book by Michael Dobbs (1989) who was the chief of staff for Margaret Thatcher for a few years. I heard him at a book show say he wrote it almost by accident as therapy on a vacation after getting squeezed out of politics.
The difference is that the sample size for Fincher is a lot larger - 9 of his 10 films have grossed >100mil, so we have very good confidence on his hit rate.
Startup Savvy CEOs have 2, maybe 3 successful companies under their belt, so it's harder to judge how much of their success is due to repeatable factors.
Katzenberg revived Disney and cofounded Dreamworks so he's not exactly short of samples of his ability to produce hit movies. Also getting the scaleup eBay CEO to sort out the internet bit was a bonus...
Even their first original show Oz (1997) [1] was good. It was clearly experimental and low budget (it's set almost entirely inside a prison so needs very few sets, props, costumes, etc.), but designed around that limitation to focus on the writing and characters. Netflix tried a similar strategy with one of their first original series, Orange Is The New Black.
There's a not-very visible but nonetheless real amount of planning and "portfolio management" that goes on behind the scenes into choosing which ostensibly "random pilots" to produce. Yes it's kind of a "reptilian" strategy by design (as opposed to "mammalian", focus-on-one-baby-at-a-time), but there is a lot of careful selection done, even if the results look random. More and more, this is a data/ML-driven space, and less and less reliant on human expertise (with human insights but also human blindspots and biases).
Absolutely, but that process is absolutely not data driven.
“Feeling” about a show, and connections to the people running are the two major factors driving those decisions.
Data driven shows tend to be forgettable and ignored by newer generations, who are the ones holding their parents’s credit cards, and therefore, a major audience for hit shows.
The trailer for Apple's new Foundation show reeked of this. All of their heavily marketed content (See, Servant, Greyhound) look like they had the same person doing the trailers.
I don't really think Amazon should be included with the other 2. I can't think of anything they've made that was "planned to be a breakout show" and didn't succeed. Their pilot program that they used to run might've been the reason for that. They're also really quick to give up on series that don't do well (which is pretty similar to Netflix).
The Grand Tour maybe hasn't become the cultural touchstone that Top Gear was, but i'm fairly certain it's still getting a ton of views. Every top gear fan i know watches it. It's not getting the buzz a new show would because it's essentially just more Top Gear, but it's definitely being watched.
I'm sure a lot of us are looking forward to it -- it's good source material, but there's no guarantee that they will pull it off well, or that even if they do a great job, that it will be a hit.
Yeah the thesis of the books (well until the Mule) is that no one person makes a big difference and it's all due to larger historical forces. Although it'd be hilarious if we follow a hero only for the show to conclude with "welp guess macro effects in galactic trade are really what caused the Empire to fall"
Kinda off-topic, but I recently read The Last Astronaut[1], and got the sense that it could make a great movie adaptation, which I almost never get from sci-fi books.
Yes but every network in existence does it and is forced into that paradigm. Every premium channel on cable (HBO/Showtime/Starz etc) have had to have a new breakout hit pretty much every year with a pretty small slate of new content - and Quibi has been able to combine this with some formats that actually should work (News, short form comedy etc).
I think the biggest issue is that there is a deluge of news and short form comedy, and it's free and good quality with a very tolerable amount of advertising on YouTube, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, television, etc, etc.
To succeed in short video they needed something that was beyond a bombshell, something desperately sought after but not forthcoming. Highly polished DeepFake Beatles concerts, with new music written by Paul McCartney. I don't see how you succeed charging for something that qualitatively better than YouTibe. You'd have to at least have new interactive elements (choose your own adventure? I don't know, but something cool).
That's what I find striking. With all their experience & expertise, the major studios spend a tremendous amount of money and consistently produce a surprising number of failures. Personally, I like the wider seeding creatively in general (as you describe with Netflix.)
And those are just the failures you see! Friends in the industry tell me there are many more failures behind the scenes where shows can get arbitrarily far down the production pipeline only for studio execs to come in and scrap the whole thing.
We're not so different from those 1000 monkeys writing shakespeare :)
I have zero idea about Netflix, Amazon, or Disney, but I hear the high turnover in execs at the big network TV studios cause this. The story I often hear is the "new guys" are terratorial and kill off projects of their predecessors so their own projects can succeed.
Not to be trite, but this was the whole biz plan of Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, et al. The algos will generate the hits. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work that way. Algos will identify the hits earlier, but they won't "make" them for you.
Yes it's hard. But they got 1.8 billions in funding, and they are trying to get a foot in a crowded space, so expectations are high for them to deliver something. You can't stay long in the TV business with just a couple million paying subscribers
I don't subscribe to prime for the video service, but they've got a couple good shows. My kids like Disney+ but I would cancel Disney+ over HBO any day.
Their mistake is they're trying to do something that all the other established players could essentially replicate overnight. Their big innovation is the shows are shorter? On top of it, their execution is poor. They put out the standard shows you would see anywhere else except edited so that a single episode turns into a half dozen shorter ones. They pretty much positioned themselves out in no man's land between Netflix and YouTube. They really seem oblivious to what's already out there, who their competition is and where they fit in.
I think if Quibi really wanted to succeed they should have partnered with YouTubers and TikTokers instead of big celebrities. They could spend more on production instead of paying just for the celebrities to be there. And the marketing is free because every online content creator is going to promote their own show.
I don't think their product is really that viable. The amount of setup, process, work, materials and money it takes to produce a 10 minute clip is just about the same amount it takes to produce a 30 minute episode.
I've enjoyed some short-form episodic content on Amazon before, but it always left me feeling short-changed, and wishing the episodes were 30 minutes. It was too quick to go through the entire series and then it's done, I have to search for more content that is high quality, which is few and far between. Maybe it's for people with ADD who can't follow a plot longer than 10 minutes long?
Quibi is relying on a gimmick, and one that isn't even difficult to copy and has been done before. I've so far not heard of any reason that would compel me to spend my time on their site when there's so much other content out there.
I'm also not sure why anyone would want Meg Whitman on board at a company like this, unless she's somehow responsible for bringing some of that 1.8 Billion in funding, and even then she should only be on the board, not in the C suite.
I remember the early days of podcasts going commercial the group think was that they should be short. I believe companies like Discovery put out podcasts that were maybe 4 minutes tops. That thinking was just as oblivious.
I remember Merlin Mann had a blog post a decade or so ago where he considered Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac the perfect podcast in that each episode was five minutes and it came out daily.
I never understood the fascination with Meg Whitman. The PayPal acquisition did not generate nearly as much value as it could and eBay is terrible, could have been what Amazon is today. I see Meg as greatly benefitting from a rising tide, not great leadership. Maybe her lieutenants have a different take but this is what I see from the outside.
> I see Meg as greatly benefitting from a rising tide, not great leadership. Maybe her lieutenants have a different take but this is what I see from the outside.
I worked at HPE, when Whitman was CEO.
The impression I got, was that she's a bit of a wizard when it comes to finance.
For instance, the organization that I was a part of, we lost a pile of money. But despite that, HPE was able to sell the org off to SuSE.
IE, if Whitman wasn't a wizard, the entire venture may have been a 100% loss. But she was able to flip that organization to another buyer.
"For All Mankind" is an absolutely amazing show from Apple. Alternate history of if Russia got to the moon first. Lots of historical footage (sometimes augmented). I loved watching it. Maybe too niche for a breakout hit but it is extremely good.
That's easy to say in hindsight, but I think if the pandemic wouldn't really happen there's a good chance their conversion would be even higher. Their whole business model is meant for consumers who are on the go with short time bursts, which is exactly the opposite of what we have today.
It very well could be that their shortage of content wouldn't have been as big of a deal because their ideal users weren't binging on their stuff, just watching while on a train or lunch break.
I'm not saying they haven't made mistakes, but it does feel like this aspect is missing in a lot of the bandwagon criticisms of the service.
This does not resonate with me- you have masses of people who now have tons of free time on their hands, and in general the trend is towards shorter formats of entertainment- especially for the demographic they are targeting.
You are really telling me that people are too busy watching 2 hour documentaries or reading books to load up Quibi for a quick hit? I don't buy this at all. We don't still have lunch breaks?
I know this is kind of the "insider narrative" on this (I actually bought my house from someone fairly high up that relocated to the west coast to work there) but this really rings hollow. After reading some of Katzenburg's comments in an article a few months ago where he said "I blame everything that has gone wrong on Coronavirus. Everything." This is not a successful approach to thinking about why your product isn't getting the market fit you thought it would. Then throw in some highly annoyed comments when it was retorted that Tik Tok is thriving with "its comparing apples to submarines." With thinking like that I don't think they stand a chance really.
Personally I can not imagine a better time to launch a video platform than the onset of a pandemic where people are stuck inside with little else to do aside from consume content.
If the content was good folks would watch it, Whether in quick bites or not.
Even then, adjusting to the new reality and repackaging 10 minute episodes of a show into 30-60 minute episodes could likely be done in an editors suite in a few weeks.
The problem is that the short time bursts are highly variable, but they specifically target 10 minutes. That's why people scroll through twitter or instagram, it fills the void, no matter how long it is.
Right, that was my intuition as well. Ten minutes is still too long for the use case that they’re targeting, of people on the go who want to fill in time looking at their phone. A ten-minute short still requires a level of concentration (and absence of interruptions) not suited for that scenario. Social media is still a lot better for that, as is tiktok’s far lower video length.
And, yes, I know it sounds kind of bizarre to ridicule a ten-minute short as “too long”. Fortunately, the public is (still, for now) absolutely willing to watch productions that take a bigger time and attention investment. It’s just, they want to watch it at home, possibly with others, on a bigscreen. Quibi deliberately avoided that with the “mobile only” constraint that they’re now reversing.
I feel like their target demographic had to be based on public-transit commuters.
Who else has:
* 10 minute+ but less than 22-30 minute "full TV show" long uninterrupted breaks
* Where their phone is the primary connectivity device
* Predictably available?
If I'm at home, I have the PC, the TV, any number of better ways to enjoy content. If I'm in a car I'm driving, I can't watch video. If I'm on the toilet or a lunch break, I may not have 10 uninterrupted minutes.
I wonder if in 20 years, we'll see it on self-driving cars as a similar fit. "Your estimated trip time is 17 minutes, here are some recommendations of programming for the dashboard screen."
Thanks for the industry insight. 1 and 2 make sense from an outsider's POV.
For 3, what would you envision for this test, other than normal market research / focus groups that they likely conducted? Surely you shouldn't launch the Quibi brand with just one show if the goal is a full-fledged streaming platform.
The recent major articles about Quibi being a disaster are not been about conversion rate, but about its huge costs combined with questionable proposition (which was particularly affected by quarantine life changes), and its poor performance on app store charts:
> As of early July, over 5 million phones had downloaded the Quibi app. Of those, 1.5 million had registered to use it, and this was with Quibi offering a three-month free trial and doing saturation marketing. (When it paused the marketing during the Black Lives Matter protests, Quibi’s App Store ranking fell to No. 1,477.) In light of its disappointing user numbers, Quibi’s advertisers have reportedly asked to renegotiate their deals. The company was forced to go into capital-conservation mode. Executives took a 10 percent pay cut.
Also, 8% does not sound like a good conversion rate for the entertainment industry, even ignoring the disparity between subscription revenue and the hundreds of millions already spent for content:
> *Meanwhile, the 90-day free trials will begin expiring this month. The industry conversion rate from a free trial to a paid subscription hovers below 33 percent. According to research firm Parks Associates, if that holds true for Quibi, it could mean less than 500,000 people would be watching a network that spent hundreds of millions of dollars on brand-new premium content.
I was dubious about Quibi when I spent months seeing the occasional advertisement and still having not the slightest idea what Quibi is or why I would want it. I figured it was some flash in the pan social network that would shortly be dead. I didn't even know it was a video service until I saw its financial distress covered on HN.
> they’re about to crash and burn, because of an 8% conversion?
They are crashing and burning because they have fewer than 100k users after nearly 4 months and aside from piling a lot more money into advertising they have no momentum, no brand awareness, and no properties anyone outside a few people know.
> Comparing them to Disney is ridiculous too, it’s Disney!
It's not about 10% versus 8%, it's about 10s of millions of paying users versus 10s of thousands. Obviously Disney had a huge head start, that's the whole point. The two services cost the same amount, what attracts new users? Content. For my $7, I'm going to sign up for the service with content I know I'll like. That's the same choice millions of people made here.
On iOS this was just in-app purchase, so you agree to start paying in 3 months when you sign up. So you never really have to manually type your credit card but you had to remember to unsubscribe within your iTunes subscriptions.
same on google play. and as far as i'm aware, those two are the only platforms that Quibi is offered on. Cancelling my trial before i was billed was really simple on Google Play, but i did have to remember to do it.
it's also interesting to note that the only way to get a quibi subscription is via the two major app stores, which both take a 30% cut. So unlike netflix, apple, disney, etc who all allow purchasing via lower-fee methods, quibi is paying 30% for every subscriber.
I find your statement surprising. The ease of changing or removing a subscription is the largest reason I would subscribe through iOS to anything. Is there something specific to Quibi?
Indeed. I'd been paying for HBO through Apple since they launched HBONow. When we got AT&T fiber, they bundled in HBOMax for free. AT&T made it annoyingly difficult to sign up for the free service. And it took a while to figure out how to unsubscribe from HBO in iTunes.
I've just got into the habit of unsubscribing every time I start a free trial on iOS. I just tap settings -> iCloud account -> subscriptions and then cancel the sub I just started. It gives me access throughout the trial and if I go to use it and it blocks me because the subscription ended I take measure of my own sadness to decide I want to pay.
On the other hand, Disney has mountains of cash behind them while Quibi is VC-funded and VCs typically want to see results to decide whether to continue or cut their losses. Disney can get away with a terrible conversion rate forever while a startup can run out of funding very quickly.
I actually don’t know if 8% is a good or bad conversion rate for free trial to month 1 paid subscriber for streaming services, or even just subscription services. In online marketing world, yes 8% is terrific, since just CTRs stand around 1%. So, just curious what baseline you’re referencing to conclude 8% is good.
Edit - some cursory googling suggests free trial to paid conversion for subscription services are generally somewhere in the 10-25% range. So I don’t think 8% is good, maybe mediocre. Note this is distinguished from lower rates associated with freemium model products(e.g., spotify). Will try to dig up some better refs to link out to.
I think it’s a mistake to treat this like a conversion experiment. Trialers at the very first possible release of a service, heavily incentivized by a very lengthy free trial, are not similar to a steady state flow of trialers experiencing more transient promos or test experiences, which is a situation where conversion modeling makes sense.
This is not a funnel experiment. This is a huge pile of people specifically seeking out a special event at a launch, so the composition and intent of that is expected to be way, way, way more favorable than general steady state.
It’s like if concert tickets went on sale and everyone is camping in tents to buy them on the first day, and then when the booth opens and people listen to the free sample, 90% of them just pack up and go home.
That’s a much, much worse situation than if only 1/10 people who see an ad for the album choose to buy it on iTunes, whole different ballgame, funnel composition, intent model, everything.
10% conversion on a massive launch promo is drastic failure. This is not at all like getting 10% conversion on a funnel with low intent.
I guess that's fair enough, it is admittedly difficult to separate that I am personally not interested in Quibi vs I don't see why it could succeed.
I guess the two things it boils down to is their place in the market, and who their customers are?
- I think Netflix speaks for itself.
- Disney+/Hulu has the power of the catalog, generations of IP, and creatives to leverage it.
- HBO is HBO if ATT can manage to keep it that way.
- Amazon has quite a few good things going on imo, and it helps a lot that its just attached to prime.
So now with these players, we're very much at the point of marginal overload. Why do I want your service? What do you have that no one else does?
So I guess what I'm really interested in is who that 8% is? In what ways does Quibi work, because I already feel like I have an idea/opinion of how it doesn't work.
If adoption and renewal keep going this way Quibi will have 8000 users.
Friends and family maybe 1,000. Forgetful people not uninstalling after the trial probably 6000. Of those 1000 users probably varied. Some expect something. Some want every streaming service. Some want 10 minute videos. Some never unsubscribe.
Also at $6.99 Disney is practically "dumping" their valuable content on the market. How is a newcomer supposed to compete with that? Talk about barriers to entry.
Netflix is getting $12.99 from me and it doesn't look like a bargain compared to Disney.
Another point. Especially with these content based services, it's all about the next piece of content you can provide.
For example, if Dave Chapelle signed an exclusive deal with Quibi, then all of a sudden those 92% that didn't want to come back will come back in droves.
Quibi isn't a lost cause, they set up the infrastructure and are just getting started on releasing content. Everything depends on if they can find their must-see-tv.
Agree seems like there is disproportionate dislike here for quibi. How many other billion dollar startups eat the shitter without this much hub-bub?
However it is fair to hate on the founder jeffrey shrekzenburg. I know some folks who work at quibi and say this dude is insufferable. Probably not as insane, but stephen wolfram levels of dooshbaggery. Dictator type who thinks is shit is golden. Turns out he made a 1.5 billion dollar piece of shit and from what i hear, he has finally accepted that maybe he isnt the greatest thing ever.
Also if you like shrek, he made shrek/dreamworks. And short little farquad is basically jaffrey katzenburg from what i've heard
The problem with Quibi is thinking that they can charge for this content.
People are not gonna pay for quick bite videos, even if they have a high production value. Why would anyone do that with such limited time?
The problem of all these platforms is that they think they are creating a new market or expanding an existing one and they forget that people only have 24 hours a day to do things.
If you create something like Quibi you're competing with Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, Xbox/PlayStation/Nintendo-Switch, Mobile Games and anything else that is trying to grab a slice of you leisure time.
Why would I pay for this when I already pay for other options with more content and get a handful for free?
Quibi is what you get when you think you know your customers but you really don't. It's the type of self-deluded product that is created in an echo chamber by rich people who believe their past success is a formula that can be reproduced at any scale as long as money is involved. The problem with that idea is that it values scale more than ingenuity.
Doing short vertical videos with high production value and charging to watch them is almost an absolute zero in terms of innovation.
Their testing was probably along the lines of "Would you watch videos in a platform like this?" and "How much are you willing to pay for a service like this?"
There are difficulties in overcoming users' expectations and actually monetising, but it shouldn't be ruled out completely. Once people are using something as a major source of entertainment, some proportion of them are usually willing to pay for even mild improvements. An analogy might be free radio broadcasts (and web radio, and piracy) versus modern music streaming services.
Make no mistake, short-form content can be a major entertainment source. Personally, I recently deleted Tiktok from my phone, more because of its power to eat up time when I ought to be sleeping than because of the recent privacy furore.
Tons and tons of people support youtubers with donations or on patron, which is in effect paying for content. I recognize the difference but I don’t think you can really make your claim so confidently.
My claim is not that people aren't willing to pay for content. My claim is that people are not willing to pay for "this" content at that price point (5 USD) in a saturated market with dozens of competitors launching at the same time with premium content offerings (Disney+, HBO Max, etc).
Also you have staple names like NBC launching services in this space for free (Peacock).
The problem with Quibi is actually a ROI problem and that's why it doesn't work IMHO. If you raise north of 1 billion to build this you are confident that your revenue is going to be significant. I think that there's not a sizeable market for this type of content, in this current market at that price point.
As a reference point, Patreon has only paid $1 billion to creators since its inception. Granted, Patreon is still growing at an accelerated rate and the trajectory seems to indicate that there's a lot of room to keep growing for the foreseeable future, but you can see that if you were to map Patreon payouts to a potential Quibi revenue trajectory they are far from turning green.
I don't think that's a good parallel but just making that comparison since you mentioned that example.
What's NBC? I think that's something my grandmother used to talk about sometimes.
I'm being semi-facetious here. I think "legacy media", particularly network broadcasters, are coasting off brand recognition earned in a bygone era that younger generations never experienced and never will. That's obviously not sustainable in the long run.
Fair point, but both those shows initially found popularity before the streaming era. Is NBC still capable of producing content that people will binge-watch 10-20 years later for a nostalgia kick?
SNL is still fairly popular, as are Brooklyn Nine-nine, Late Night, The Tonight Show, etc. And 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation wrapped up not that long ago.
They also do have a major ace up their sleeve as the official American broadcaster of the Olympics.
But that's still very nearly the opposite sort of business model as Quibi. Youtubers generally start out with very little investment and build their audiences manually through grassroots interest. I don't know of anyone who has raised over a billion dollars and created a huge expensive production company upfront before then launching a Patreon account and getting enough $5/month patrons to make it worth it. That idea sounds ludicrous because it likely is ludicrous.
>According to the firm’s new report on Quibi’s early growth, the short-form video platform signed up about 910,000 users in its first few days back in April. Of those users, only about 72,000 stuck around after the three-month free trial, indicating the app had about an 8 percent conversion rate.
I fully expect Quibi to crash and burn under the weight of the content costs among other things, but is an 8% conversion rate bad for converting from free to paid? What's the appropriate benchmark for this kind of thing?
Exact benchmarks are going to vary per product, but yeah it's bad.
For free trials where you don't provide billing info in advance (e.g. a lot of software 30-day trials) 8% would be a great rate. Because the default do-nothing action is nothing.
But for subscription services where you do provide billing info in advance, 8% retention is pretty terrible. If 92% of people are taking the effort to cancel, when the default is to let the subscription charge... it's definitely not great.
(I'm assuming Quibi required billing info in advance, like pretty much every other subscription content service does.)
Do you have a source with that? Based off of the majority of my family members it seems like that would be the opposite. I wouldn't be surprised that there's a correlation between tech-savvy individuals and those who cancel straight to subscription trials right away.
I work for a company with a premium service, and we have a number of employees who have worked on other premium services. It’s definitely true in the aggregate.
* Worth noting, since you mention tech savvy individuals, that these are not tech savvy services (although buying a premium service from an app on your phone probably immediately skews you somewhat tech savvy).
That brand recognition and catalog would also increase the denominator of people signing up for the trial though. It's not clear to me how these two effects would net out.
But who has that kind of conversion rate? Disney with all its weight managed to convert not much more than that - percentage wise, although much more in absolute terms and article make that point. Are there any data points from Netflix, Hulu, Spotify. Amazon Prime is a bit of a different beast, as it is a bundle.
Quibi seems to be trying to convert a users who would normally kill 5-10 minutes on Snapchat or Instagram into killing that same time on their platform. The problem is that this user pool is perfectly content killing thier 5-10 minutes on Snapchat or Instagram and convincing them that they actually need the "Snapchat or Netflix" is going to be very hard, especially when they charge a subscription.
If I am only willing to kill 5-10 minutes on my phone, my investment in whatever it is ill be killing time on is very low. So I suspect it's going to be very difficult to convince these users to pay a monthly fee for a service when Snapchat offers a similar level of gratification for free.
I never understood their pitch in first place.
Why pay for quick bites when I get decent content (~10min) for free on youtube?
Generally, I would assume people watch netflix/amazon/disney content for entertainment and expect their originals to be of the usual or slight longer duration. That's content to enjoy watching over a longer period of time. People like this format, hence binge watching is a thing.
I can't see why people would rather watch a highly produced quick bite while waiting in line for a coffee instead of watching a new upload from a subscribed creator on youtube for like 10 minutes. There are plenty of famous youtubers upload almost daily, with daily/weekly views much higher than the total app downloads quibi has so far. And they don't have a ~2B$ war chest.
Verizon attempted a similar content/audience strategy to Quibi several years ago, with their content platform called go90 [1]. Their pitch centered around the lack of 15-20 minute video content with high production values, and the assumption that this type of content would be successful with millennials and commuters.
They burned over $1B and it was a colossal failure -- apparently so forgettable that none of the coverage on Quibi even mentions it.
One major difference: go90 was a free service, and it was even zero-rated for Verizon Wireless customers (i.e. didn't count against subscriber data caps). Yet it remained a failure across several attempted pivots before Verizon threw in the towel completely.
> the lack of 15-20 minute video content with high production values,
What a truly bizarre tack if that's what they really though. A "30 minute" TV episode is actually about 20-21 minutes minus the ads, intro, and credits.
And then promptly went back to either reading stuff in Instapaper, or listening to podcasts, or playing Pokémon Go if we were moving at a slow enough speed.
Quibi is like TikTok with celebrities that I have to pay for. I know the content is scripted, longer, and well-produced, but it seriously just feels like expensive TikTok, and I couldn't justify paying for it when the only content I wanted was Reno 911, which I finished watching during the trial.
That could be the other problem. The trial is long enough to finish watching the one thing on Quibi you downloaded it to watch.
The content is SO random that I can't imagine someone finds more than 1, maybe 2, things to watch that are to their liking.
Quibi has the problem that other platforms like it have: thinking celebrities are the right way to entice people. Luminary Podcasts has the same issue.
Majority of gen Z / millennial folks that I know, don't care about Trevor Noah or any of the late night comedians. They care more about famous YouTubers and TikTok stars.
In my personal observations of the matter it is more that it's just a different kind of celebrity than their original draw. Nobody earnestly cares if some hollywood star becomes a professional golfer, singer, or race car driver. They have to build themselves up anew to this new audience who is selecting 'celebrity status' by a different set of rules and criteria. Now if someone in hollywood moves to another position within hollywood like actor to director hey are still closely related to the same rules of selection so they get a boost just from qualifying to what the audience is looking at.
Given that this is where there is just a separate group of people that understands or learns the selection criteria for YouTube/Twitter/TikTok/Twitch whatever and can have more synergy transferring between these outlets. It makes sense that someone who in another setting is popular just seems to land flat when they are having to relearn a new way of presenting themselves and the old tools don't work. Even celebrities that start a YouTube channel that I at least followed in passing end up feeling terrible, and I don't think I've seen a hollywood grade external star stick with their YouTube content long enough to actually start learning what needs to change.
I'd think that the jump in breadth would qualify as a categorical difference instead of just one in degree. Distribution has gotten more efficient before, as with cable TV or the birth of the modern music industry, but the low stakes and nonexistent barrier to entry of being a YouTuber is a whole new kind of flux in celebrities.
This doesn't suggest that no youtubers have staying power: Pewdiepie has been around for a while and has a massive subscriber count. But he is literally the best of the best, and my point is just that the staying power of a celeb is now more fluid all up and down the distribution of popularity.
Millenial in the slightly under 30 crowd: There actually are still a few celebrity comedian types that could still pull me (and everyone in my millenial friend group) to subscribe to a new network with original content (Jon Stewart, Dave Chapelle, Dan Harmon), but those guys don't come cheap. Most of my friend group couldn't even name famous Youtubers / TikTok people though, that must be a Gen Z / borderline-Gen-Z millenial thing.
If quibi was actually interested in making stuff to suit millennial taste, they should have focused on absurdist comedy, which is usually short-form anyhow. Stuff like Eric Andre or Adult Swim's "Infomercials" series ("Too Many Cooks", "Unedited Footage of a Bear" + many others that vary from amazingly memorable and funny to unwatchably awful) is exactly the kinda of stuff that I wont invest over 20 minutes in (absurd humor tends to get boring when it loses it's novelty), but whenever I find one that's really good - I'll show it to all of my friends. Having a decent budget, cast and production quality also really makes a big difference with what can be accomplished, so random absurdist youtubers usually can't provide the same experience. The fact that the Reno 911 reboot is the only thing on quibi doing well sort of confirms that the "weird comedy" genre is still underutilized.
I'm a young millennial, and my perspective is that all of these nighttime shows are supposed to be funny, but none of them are really designed to be funny to my demographic. The Tonight Show (the Stephen Colbert one) seems directed at 55+ liberals, from what I can tell. Last Week Tonight is the only one of these shows I ever watch, and I don't tune in to see it, I just catch the specials they upload to YouTube.
But I suspect that "YouTube celebrities" are not something that platforms like Quibi can tap into. I'd say the whole phenomenon could easily be a symptom of which platforms kids (<18) have easy, free access to. Add in network effects - if a plurality of kids is watching and talking about some drama unfolding among elite YouTubers, it's very easy to turn that plurality into a majority.
Even though I fit the bill of watching YouTube rather than TV, I don't think Quibi would be successful by hiring "Dude Perfect" or whoever (just to pull the first name I recognized off the trending tab). Personally, I have about 50 subscriptions on YouTube, and the median channel has only ~330k subscribers. The biggest (Last Week Tonight) has less than 10 million. Taking me as an indicator of what millenials are doing would be the worst kind of anecdata, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that a majority of people my age aren't following any of the so-called celebrities. What's a name that would pull me to a new platform? ... I can't come up with one, actually. And kids are on YouTube because it's free and easy to access - they're not potential Quibi subscribers either.
(Sorry for the long comment, yours was interesting and provoked some introspection.)
They went the wrong route with programming. Instead of top quality content with A/B list actors, they should have dumped out a lot of cheap reality show content. That stuff works well 10 minutes at a time on network TV (between commercials). Think Real World, Blind Date, Cribs. It’s cheap to make, appeals to the target market for Quibi, and would have required a LOT less funding at the beginning from the investors who now seem likely to lose all their money.
A few others have mentioned that Quibi is not an interesting enough alternative timewasting app to Snapchat, Instagram, etc. I agree and I'm glad to see it fail for that reason; I want my attention span back and I'm trying to cut these things out of my life. I notice my well-being improves when I do.
That's personal preference obviously, and people are free to spend their time how they want, but I think the loss of attention span is a culture-scale problem now and excising these companies from our lives is a necessary treatment.
I hope Quibi folds permanently and we salt the earth where it stood.
Like I said this is personal preference. I've never used it but I think it makes culture worse so I hope it goes under.
I never know what people are going to like so maybe it will become the next TikTok instead, or someone will make a new Quibi that I also won't use or understand :)
I really wanted to like Quibi. I enjoyed the Most Dangerous Game romp, I really loved the daily updates from the BBC, and overall the idea of content specifically made for ~10 minute sprints work perfectly for me.
The rest of the content though... Pretty bad, at least to me. One daily show isn't enough to keep me around.
Anyone know of a solid, ~15 minute daily news report similar to what the BBC was offering on Quibi? Preferably something with a worldwide scope. I'd happily pay a fraction of Quibi's monthly fee for just that show.
> Sensor Tower is a reputable analytics company known for reporting accurate estimates
I see SensorTower quoted a lot for mobile analytics, but their methods are completely opaque AFAIK. For all I know, one can “buy” good analytics by giving them some money, in order to promote an app.
Alternatively, nepotism could skew analytics: the CTO’s brother-in-law’s app gets higher usage and download ratings than a competitor.
I hadn't heard of this service until just now but I worry that it is another volley against the consumer in the war on the attention span.
It can't be good for individuals or our collective to consume all of our media in short, predigested clips (or posts, or comments). I genuinely believe that the average capacity for "long running" thoughts (and general idea complexity) is being eroded.
I think a big problem might be marketing. I’ve not seen Quibi advertised anywhere. I don’t know anyone personally who has tried it. I only know a few who have even heard of it. Even if you consider the conversion rate good, I don’t think they’ve had many people at the top of their funnel.
The conversion rate isn't the biggest problem. The big problem is their launch got so little momentum/ uptake to begin with and their platform has no presence. In spite of their high dollar Super Bowl commercial, nobody outside tech seems to know what they are or why they would subscribe to them.
Having an unknown service is bad enough, but they have no base to grow from. Disney+ is Disney. Apple TV+ has Apple behind them and is able to offer a free year with every iPhone. HBO, CBS, MLB, and even Hulu have big, well known brands with known content. Everyone in streaming started with a base or with at least free content.
It's not the 8% that's the issue here, it's the fact that they have fewer than a hundred thousand users and no momentum.
The free trial code was pretty poorly implemented. I remember I signed up, and it didn't let me watch immediately. By the time I verified email or whatever the heck they wanted and tried again, the trial had expired and so I never even got to try a single video...
I'm not sure which one is more "impressive," between Wirecard and Quibi, as a mechanism for making around $2 billion disappear.
On one hand, Wirecard at least maintained the illusion that the money had not been disappearing, for years and years. They fooled auditors, regulators, and investors all over the world, again and again. That takes major cojones.
On the other hand, Quibi is managing to vaporize the money very quickly with Hollywood glamour and spectacle. If you're going to blow things up, there's something to be said for doing it with style. Peter Sellers would be proud of their unintentional "performance."
A ~10% conversion from free to paid is something quite a few companies would sign for on the spot. Depending on the industry you can see < 1% to < .1% and still be happy. All that matters is whether or not the customers that do convert stay long enough to make it worth your while. If 50% converts but they all cancel after month 1 that's a lot worse than if 10% converts and they stay for 30 years.
Obviously this is anecdata but: I've not been drawn to Quibi at all because I've tried to be MORE purposeful in my entertainment choices ("I feel like watching that new Funny Movie tonight"), not less ("Eh, I've got 10-minutes until the dentist calls me in. Better fill that with a random thing on Quibi").
sensor tower is great for mobile app estimates but really falls flat on its face with streaming.
first, downloads do not mean payment or usage. you can download an app long before you use it.
second, as netflix confirmed years ago, 70%+ of sign-ups happen on TVs – probably even more during COVID – so app activity is not a meaningful lever of insights.
I have serious doubts as the viability of Quibi, mainly from my experience with sci-fi short-story compilations.
Sure there have been some great short story compilations, but paradoxically, the better they are the worse they feel. As you just get invested in a great story/world only to have it end a short time later.
Where is the vertical video app that lets you watch your favorite YouTube/IG/Twitch-type “content creators” on your phone in the same easy/addictive format as Stories?
That seems to be what people want, not network produced scripted tv made brief + vertical.
> Where is the vertical video app that lets you watch your favorite YouTube/IG/Twitch-type “content creators” on your phone in the same easy/addictive format as Stories?
Yeah, this kind of content/UI is definitely available on Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and probably Facebook.
YouTube and Twitch though seem to have some of the strongest "content creator" culture and are both still stuck in landscape videos and other sub-optimal phone UI.
I acknowledge this is my cynicism mostly talking, but I get the impression that Quibi has switched to the "guilt the consumer into subscribing" marketing strategy given all the press about it (including interviews with executives).
I can't imagine Apple TV+ having any better conversion rate unless people just forget to cancel their subscriptions at the end of the trial. There's just so little content there and basically nothing that people talk about.
I got a year of Apple TV+ just for getting a new Apple device. If you cancel early, you cancel for good. I put a reminder on my calendar to cancel at the end of a trial. I have yet to even attempt to watch anything because of poor reviews and klout.
I remember during the Apple TV+ announcement that Tim Cook was using phrases like "the best stories" and "the best content". I thought it was so arrogant.
I watched the Morning Show on AppleTV+ and enjoyed it. I also watched the Homes series, which I really enjoyed. But, this is just a "free with iDevice purchase" kind of thing.
I think there's a place for Apple to get this right. They have a music streaming service that makes sense. They're a major player in the podcast space. They've long sold digital music, TV, and movies. Apple has been in the content game since the early days of the iPod. A properly executed Apple TV+ could fit with their brand.
But you're right, they're fucking up.
To me, Apple's content tends to be way too safe. It's boring. (Or, at least it was boring when I saw it.) If I want straight-down-the-middle-of-American-culture-type content, I already have Disney+ and way too many other choices. If they want to grab my attention, they need to take some risks and/or find their niches.
This is what I appreciate about the other major tech company with a me-too streaming service: Amazon. Prime Video is willing to take risks on weird genre stuff, and some of it is really good. I could never see Apple releasing something like Fleabag or The Boys. That perception is probably why Apple TV+ has been so forgettable. Boring has no place in Apple's branding.
>They have a music streaming service that makes sense. They're a major player in the podcast space. They've long sold digital music, TV, and movies.
The transition from a music store to a music streaming platform made sense. "Hey, you know the music that you could have bought so far? Well, now you can stream it."
Not so much for the movie/TV show business. "Hey, you know the TV shows and movies you could rent and buy? Well, fuck those, we have ten original titles that you should watch instead."
Apple TV+ doesn't feel like it builds on top of the experience and connections made with the movie/TV show renting/selling business. I just opened up the Apple TV application on my iPhone and the What to Watch list is rather sad. First one is USS Greyhound, which might actually be a decent watch. Next one is "Greatness Code", doesn't really look like my cup of tea, but probably it's probably not crap. In third there's "The Gentlemen" - oops, only available for purchase at 13.99 euro!
When you mention it that way, a one year trial seems like a really good way to smooth out that drop rate. It takes a while before people notice that recurring charge.
I'm sure there's more to it than this, but I think that a bit of unfortunate timing may have contributed to Quibi's demise. This may have had a chance in the pre-lockdown world when everyone was rushing around, and had a few short moments of boredom in between.
With most people no longer commuting and most forms of entertainment and recreation closed, a lot of people have fewer things competing for their time. I think many people are now spending their time on things that use up longer chunks of time: watching TV or movies, going outside, and hobbies.
Never heard of this service. Seems like they have too much money at hand. When you have billions you start to think that every problem can be solved with money and that inhibits creative solutions. Instead of organic growth based on the value they can provide, they try to buy their way into the premium league.
you mean audiences didn’t flock to “gayme show”? did they try at all to make content they think people want rather than blindly just getting celebs on it?
I loved Quibi's short form dramatic and comedic content.
Shape of Pasta is a cooking show about rare pasta types -- sometimes being made by only a single person in a village!
Run This City - A documentary about Jasiel Correia, the youngest mayor in Massachusetts who get's caught in numerous controversies.
Nightgowns follows Drag Queen Sasha Velour's Nightgowns tour, this program worked particularly well on the service.
There are a couple more shows that I live Dishmantled, Let's Roll, Singled Out.
The issue is that these shows had 7 - 10 episodes each. Most of Quibi's content is daily news programming. It honestly felt similar to the daily news shows I can get on Snapchat for free.
If Quibi had more shows like the non-daily news shows I think I would have stayed longer, but Quibi's content is mostly daily news.
I mean, I like pasta as much as the next guy, but if their best show is "a cooking show about rare pasta types", I'm not in the least surprised they're having trouble getting people to pay for this.
I actually know a lot of asian women who like watching what's essentially food tourism TV series and even recommend them to me. Food is definitely a genre that has fans. Besides big fancy ones that go to new cities and regions every episode, there's also smaller fun ones like how the Japanese have a live action and cartoon version of a guy who goes to a different food shop every episode.
I felt similarly. I have enjoyed most of their scripted comedy and drama, but I was surprised that they ended after two weeks (10 episodes.) I was expecting to be drawn into some of these shows over months and be hooked on several stories so I’d continue my trial. Releasing only ~90 minutes of programming per title, and not having many new titles, made it easy to let my trial expire.
That's a positive number. If they had designed their business around 'the next 2 years' and not 'everyone will buy all of it right away' well then maybe they stood a chance.
Comparing them to Disney is ridiculous too, it’s Disney! With multiple generations obsessed with their library and people literally counting down the days until their launch, they got a 10% conversion... but 8% is horrible and the end of Quibi?