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Businesses The Almighty Buck

Netflix Heads for Worst Day in Two Decades as Investors Hit 'Not For Me' (reuters.com) 341

Netflix shares lost over a third of their value on Wednesday after the company reported its first drop in subscribers in a decade, leaving Wall Street questioning its growth in the face of fierce competition and post-pandemic viewer fatigue. From a report: The streaming pioneer's shares fell 37% to $220.40 and were headed for their worst day in nearly 18 years if the losses hold. More than a dozen analysts rushed to temper their views on a stock that has been a red-hot market performer in the past few years. "Netflix is a poster child for what happens to growth companies when they lose their growth," said Kim Forrest, chief investment officer at Bokeh Capital Partners in Pittsburgh. Elon Musk weighed in on Netflix's subscriber loss by responding to a Slashdot tweet, saying "the woke mind virus" is making the streaming platform "unwatchable." He added, "Can they please just make sci-fi/fantasy at least *mostly* about sci-fi/fantasy?"
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Netflix Heads for Worst Day in Two Decades as Investors Hit 'Not For Me'

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @11:03AM (#62462230)

    Thank goodness lord musk weighed in.

    im sure it has nothign to do with the massive loss of russian accounts or people cancelling because they raised the price again and are cracking down on account sharing.

    its unwatchably woke, thats the reason.

    • In two completely unrelated events the ruble is being artificially propped up and will soon collapse and Marjorie Taylor Green’s campaign is deep in the red.

    • by Baloo Uriza ( 1582831 ) <baloo@ursamundi.org> on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @11:36AM (#62462358) Homepage Journal
      My initial reaction to Musk's take was "you know what they say, if you're 20 and conservative, you have no heart; but if you're 40 and conservative, you have no brain"
      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Well, it was a very different meaning of conservative, but the quote was (approx.) "if you're over 40 and not conservative, you have no brain" https://quoteinvestigator.com/... [quoteinvestigator.com]

        I kept my paraphrase as close to your version as possible, but folow the link to see the original.

        • To be conservative no longer has a meaning in the U.S.

          A conservative should for example be an environmentalist as they should want to preserve the environment to maintain the status quo.

        • The right is pretty consistent about projecting their own inadequacies on everyone else. My version fixes it for accuracy.
      • My favorite version was: "To be young and conservative is heartless; to be old and liberal is stupid."
      • "If you're rich and not tweeting nonsense, you're not rich enough!"

    • by onefriedrice ( 1171917 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @12:06PM (#62462502)
      It turns out people don't really like preachy content. Which is what a lot of content nowadays is. That words seems an accurate descriptor for a lot of content nowadays.

      Have you ever watched something "preachy" in your life? Of course you have. We all have. You know, with the tedious, over-the-top moralizing? Probably a lot of Christian content classifies.

      But this is what "mainstream" content has become: preachy. And it turns out that people don't like "woke preachy" any more than they like "Christian preachy". It's all too cringey, repetitive, boring and, yes, unwatchable. And Netflix isn't alone; which is a reason why the value of a lot of other entertainment and news streaming services has also been falling.

      Undoubtedly the economy is also a factor. In the face of inflation like this, of course a Netflix subscription would be high on the list of things people are going to cut. Russia is also a contributing factor, although it certainly doesn't cover enough lost accounts to cover the huge Q1 expectation gap. There are multiple reasons for the fall of Netflix, but -- love him or hate him -- Musk is right: content is the main reason.

      Unfortunately it doesn't look like Netflix is externally yet ready to admit the real problem, which reduces the likelihood of them being able to course correct. It's hard to unaccidentally solve a problem that you won't acknowledge or seek to understand. Hopefully they're at least acknowledging the problem internally. Otherwise they're screwed.
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

        Thank you, this is a very apt word for the problem at hand. It's not so much that it's woke. I can disagree with woke ideas without walking out of a cinema... but this arrogance of shoving it in people's faces like they want to say, and in some cases literally do, "this is SO obvious, you must be really dumb to not be on board with it yet".

        Meanwhile just about everything that ideology touches turns to toxic waste, pun intended. And then people wonder why it doesn't sell.

        Frankly I'm looking for a definition/

      • by MBGMorden ( 803437 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @12:55PM (#62462716)

        I think this comment nailed it. My mom (a devout Christian) likes to watch sunday televangelists and those goofy Christian movies like "Left Behind". I can't stand that moral grandstanding crap.

        The same goes for the opposite end of the spectrum though. "Woke" is just the left's version of "Holy". Sinner if you're right, bigot if you're left.

        There's just a lot of people in the middle who want to be left the hell alone. They wander to the right, get annoyed, then wander to the left, get annoyed, and then repeat, ad infinitum. Its what causes the political pendulum to swing.

    • by groobly ( 6155920 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @12:12PM (#62462528)

      Woke is part of the problem. About 20% of content is now purely woke. The remaining content all has woke features, like every doctor must be black, every CEO must be a woman, every group of kids contains all races, every show has at least one gay character, men are always buffoons, women are always the wise ones, etc.

      But, the root problem is that (a) there is less and less interesting content, woke or not, and (b) because of their idiot user interface that prevents you from saying "never recommend this again" you have to wade through the same sewer pipes with the same crap you rejected 100 times before, before you can find the 1% that's worth watching. At some point, it's just too much trouble.

  • More like someone is trying to hit the "FUD button" on their stock really hard. Someone have a short position that is due soon?

    I agree that Netflix is slowly going the way of Blockbuster because all the good content has moved on to HBO Max, Disney+, Paramount+, and Hulu, but this reeks of stock manipulation.

    • I agree - third post in a row reeks of stock manipulation.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • No interest in ever going to those other channels. I don't watch netflix as much anymore, but when I stop completely it will NOT be replaced by lesser and worse services such as those you list. If you have to subscribe to more than one streaming service then it means all of them are bad. The major reason so many people cut the cable cord was to save money, not to start subbing to everything that exists.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Same. Netflix saw a huge boost during COVID lockdown. The end of lockdowns plus the clamp down on password sharing, and natural saturation, all lead to believe this shit just wasn't properly priced in yet. Now it's priced in; time to buy.

  • Ever since Trump got in office, Elon has been turning more and more right. I mean, in 2016 he even claimed he was a socialist. That was back when his cars were getting tax credits and Tesla was living off getting paid for carbon offset credits. Now though, it seems he forgot all that? The right-wing used to hate Tesla and Elon Musk. I mean as recently as last year he said he didn't want Trump back.

    I figure during the Trump era and afterwards, a few things things happened:

    1. Elon got wealthier, and hoez like

    • Ever since Trump got in office, Elon has been turning more and more right. I mean, in 2016 he even claimed he was a socialist. That was back when his cars were getting tax credits and Tesla was living off getting paid for carbon offset credits. Now though, it seems he forgot all that? The right-wing used to hate Tesla and Elon Musk. I mean as recently as last year he said he didn't want Trump back.

      I figure during the Trump era and afterwards, a few things things happened:

      1. Elon got wealthier, and hoez like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders started insulting him. Nobody on the left stood up to the left-wing extremists, thereby driving Elon away from the left and to the right-wing. 2. Tesla doesn't need bail-out loan or cash from carbon offset credits, nor do they need the environmentalist/global warming angle anymore because the cars are getting more mainstream. They don't need boot-up cash from left-wing anymore. 3. California treated him like shit, especially during the pandemic when they shutdown the Tesla factory instead of providing him a way to stay in operation. 4. Biden cozying up to unions, giving Ford and GM special treatment and breaks over Tesla 5. Biden/FAA putting all kinds of obstacles in the way of SpaceX making it harder for them to test Starship.

      Let me add a 6. He got older and smarter. Happens to a lot of people, see the voting preference vs age demographics data.

  • Mike Flanagan is single-handedly keeping Netflix alive with his periodic horror mini-series, but otherwise it's turned into a vast mediocrity.

    I remember years when when they were practically mass-producing genius, it was intoxicating. Where did that company go?
    • Did it ever exist? The "glory days" of Netflix everyone seems to remember is when they were mostly licensed content and maybe when they just started doing their own shows. Their success got a majority of the licensed content pulled as everybody hoards their own catalogs now.

      I don't think their record has ever been great with original productions. I would say it's always been 50% mediocre, it's just more apparent now that it's mostly full of their own content now.

    • Television has always been a vast mediocrity. To all those rushing to Disney+ because they stole all the Marvel and Star Wars, well all the recent Marvel movies are astoundingly mediocre, and anything beyond the first Star Wars were just mediocre money grabs.

  • What am I missing? (Score:4, Informative)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @11:46AM (#62462394)
    Netflix' share price has been going up because it performed well because of the pandemic. Now the pandemic restrictions are being relaxed, it's also losing a lot of the content from Disney that made it attractive to viewers in the first place, & traders don't think it's worth so much anymore. As far as I understand how share prices work, the amount traders pay for a small percentage of shares over a particular period of time doesn't reflect the actual value of the all the shares, i.e. the whole company. You'd find that out when somebody made a bid for all the shares.
  • by bubblyceiling ( 7940768 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @11:47AM (#62462400)
    The stock literally started dumping moments after Cramer tweeted a "BUY" for Netflix. Market manipulation anyone?
  • It's not about "woke" or whatever, so much as Netflix keeps killing off good shows after only one season. Cowboy Bebop seems to be one of the latest examples where seemingly even before the episodes dropped they had decided to kill it. And the company that popularized "binge watching" for some reason doesn't seem to like shows with lots of episodes. I mean... WTF!? Seems like you'd WANT shows with 50-100 or more episodes. The more episodes the better, so people can... you know... binge them. The nice thing

    • I remember watching the first episode of "Another Life" on Netflix and they had this awkward cross dressing character. It just felt too forced and like they were forcing me to put up with some stupid political statement if I wanted to check out a SciFi show. Needless to say, I think I fast-forward a lot of the episode then never bothered to watch the rest. Either way, I won't pay money to have irrelevant topics force fed down my throat. Keep that crap on fox news and cnnbc
  • I was one of the people that cancelled netflix recently, after subscribing for years. For me the reasons were:

    1. Not many high quality shows, compared to other streaming services.
    2. User Interface annoyances.
    3. Found I wasn't using it enough to justify the cost.

    What I would really like is to NOT manage n-number of separate streaming all-access catalogs. I'd really like a place to go and get a show or a film a la carte. I feel like we've somehow found ourselves trapped in the whole "cable bundling" horrible

    • I was one of the people that cancelled netflix recently, after subscribing for years. For me the reasons were:

      1. Not many high quality shows, compared to other streaming services.
      2. User Interface annoyances.
      3. Found I wasn't using it enough to justify the cost.

      Yeah, I just ditched it when 4k hit $21/mo. Too many other options, and only a finite amount of time to watch them.

  • by Freischutz ( 4776131 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @12:07PM (#62462504)

    etflix Heads for Worst Day in Two Decades as Investors Hit 'Not For Me'

    Markets saturate, growth cannot continue forever except maybe in the cocaine addled brains of Wall Street analysts. I'm not cancelling my Netflix sub, it's hands down the best streaming service available to me.

  • Can they please just make sci-fi/fantasy at least *mostly* about sci-fi/fantasy?

    Dear Musk, check out Light Novels/Manga/Anime from Japan if you want an uncomplicated story set in a weird universe.
    Maybe American entertainment is not for you?


    Lets us ignore the fact that the very best of the fantasy and scifi genres have social commentary in them.

    • Can they please just make sci-fi/fantasy at least *mostly* about sci-fi/fantasy?

      I thought the fantasy was that somehow Tesla was the most valuable car company in the world?

  • The stock price reflected the belief that Netflix would keep growing very rapidly. Amazon had other markets to tap into after books, and then electronics.
    Netflix will continue to be a leader in streaming but won't expand at the rate that justifies the huge P/E ratio they have been trading at.

  • Back to basics (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @12:49PM (#62462690) Journal

    Netflix got away from their core competency, which was a lot of movies (new and old, including obscure ones), a lot of TV shows (new and old) and went whole hog on reality TV nonsense, standup comedy and complete garbage. They have maybe a handful of decent new movies every year and an occasional must-see series like Better Call Saul, and that's it. Nobody wants to pay every month for maybe a dozen things a year really worth watching.

    Spotify made the same mistake, getting away from their core competency of a lot of music (across genres and eras) and throwing in with niche podcasts. Instead of investing in a better recommendation algorithm and better UI, they spent $200 million on Joe Rogan. Their stock is down almost 2/3 off it's high. Favorite music can be listened over and over for a lifetime. Even if you love Joe Rogan, how many times can you listen to any of his podcasts? Are there people who put his shows on repeat? For less than the cost of a Spotify subscription, I can get YouTube Music (which has all the same music as Spotify and then some), with YouTube Premium (ad-free) thrown in.

    All of these entertainment-streaming services have to learn: there's a lot of competition for our attention. If you snooze, you lose. Offer value and people will come.

  • The are suffering from blockbuster syndrome. They don't realize most people will just find another streaming service when they get enough of their high handed tactics. They were first and now they are headed for last, at last.
  • I think the comments here are burying the lead- Slashdot for the first time in years is actually tangentially relevant to a news story!

C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas l'Informatique. -- Bosquet [on seeing the IBM 4341]

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