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.
https://www.vulture.com/2020/07/is-anyone-watching-quibi.htm...
> 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.