Many companies don't get to the point of extreme performance, but when they do suddenly new problems arise. Optimizing the hell out of one metric or multiple metrics absolutely leads to erosion in other metrics.
The metrics that involve longevity tend to get ignored, especially in a competitive market that requires companies to spend to acquire users (they also are ignored when management is pushing on short term numbers.) If they are far enough out, your company crashes. This is a problem every business faces. Warren Buffet even has a few things to say about certain industries where, over the lifetime of a business they don't turn a profit. Short term metrics can be very dangerous.
In the relationship to what you mentioned with e-mail, the company is has an incentive, by the current spam filtering "cartel" (that is a huge stretch of words, but basically Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft) to send as much email as possible! The 100 emails in the inbox of a user that doesn't market them as spam pushes that marked as spam rate down. There is certainly a threshold involved in sending email users aren't looking at at all, but what those numbers are is a hazy. The spam complaint rate, everyone in email knows.
Sending tons of unnecessary, non-personalized, irrelevant email is a branding problem.
Many companies don't get to the point of extreme performance, but when they do suddenly new problems arise. Optimizing the hell out of one metric or multiple metrics absolutely leads to erosion in other metrics.
The metrics that involve longevity tend to get ignored, especially in a competitive market that requires companies to spend to acquire users (they also are ignored when management is pushing on short term numbers.) If they are far enough out, your company crashes. This is a problem every business faces. Warren Buffet even has a few things to say about certain industries where, over the lifetime of a business they don't turn a profit. Short term metrics can be very dangerous.
In the relationship to what you mentioned with e-mail, the company is has an incentive, by the current spam filtering "cartel" (that is a huge stretch of words, but basically Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft) to send as much email as possible! The 100 emails in the inbox of a user that doesn't market them as spam pushes that marked as spam rate down. There is certainly a threshold involved in sending email users aren't looking at at all, but what those numbers are is a hazy. The spam complaint rate, everyone in email knows.
Sending tons of unnecessary, non-personalized, irrelevant email is a branding problem.