Getting people to pay for digital media in the era of mass piracy (Spotify, Deezer, Netflix)
Starting a taxi company by
ignoringfrauding all the regulation related to taxi operation, ( Uber)Tons of pseudo science like energy therapy which are not much different from straight up witchcraft.
A thought also for real estate developer who buy land in high-flood-risk area, and still manage to sell the houses, these ones also should be in jail
The first one is pretty much down to, as Gabe Newell puts it, “piracy is a service problem”. Spotify came along and (initially) provided a much better service compared to pirating your music at the time. Once they created the market segment, competitors started their own streaming subscriptions. I’d also say the Google music “upload 50,000 tracks for free” got a lot of former pirates to jump.
Now the services are going through the same enshittification that most popular online services seem to be going through, we can see piracy increasing again. Someone will notice and fill the gap in providing a good service again at some point and the pendulum will swing once more
Starting a taxi company by ignoring frauding all the regulation related to taxi operation, ( Uber)
TBF people also enjoyed parts of it that aren’t regulation related, such as upfront cost calculation. Scamming customers is harder and even in those events, it’s possible to get refunds.
Ah yeah, lots of pseudo-medicine falls into it.
Of course water has memory.
Of couse physically abusing your kid is healthy for it.
Of course this quartz will help you.
And then you actually strike gold with this shit and years later a well-known actress is selling candles that smell like her minge. Unbelievable.
Don’t knock witchcraft like that. I have more faith in our witches than those pedalling energy-based solutions.
Running a conservative podcast that was more than 90% funded by RT while proclaiming a deep patriotism.
Netflix killing password sharing despite how easy piracy is. Massive increase in subscriptions
Piracy is not as nice for average people. It requires effort many won’t want to put in to discover what they want (and not in a shitty quality), and then managing and accessing that which you found takes a lot of effort as well to set up in a manner as easily accessed as a Netflix app.
Most people can’t/won’t bother wasting their time and effort. They’ll just pay for a service for the convenience. And before people interject with their anecdotes, convenience is subjective.
Honestly in my younger years I had the time to hunt around for the right streams, rips, subtitle files etc, but it does take time and effort. For the price of a few sandwiches or a handful of coffees I don’t have to spend the time doing that anymore.
What’s annoying is that it’s not a single subscription anymore, it’s 4-5 subscriptions which really adds up over the month.
I suspected Netflix to lose sub counts for two years after they enacted their ‘No Account Sharing (outside the household).’ policy. But it seems that they have been able to bounce back quite quickly, compared to my guess.
Someone once made a mountain of cash selling pet rocks.
I have an official USB pet rock I got from a thinkgeek back in the day. Has a little box with air holes and everything.
Exactly as functional as the original pet rock, but has a short USB cable attached.
Was that one of their excellent April Fool’s Day items? I looked forward to seeing the joke items they put out every year.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure it was
I have a major curiosity about how this actually happened. I’ve watched a video or two about it but it still baffles me to this day that SOOOOO many people bought it as a x-mas present for their kid(s).
I’ve wanted to learn a couple of things about this.
A. What did the parents think of their kids asking for such a stupid present?
B. What did the parents who refused to purchase a Pet Rock, have to deal with at home, when their kid(s) were informed that they were not getting one ever?
C. (On the flip side of B.) What did the parents of those who did purchase them notice or deal with at home?
D. What psychological reasoning would anyone have to desire to purchase a Pet Rock, instead of making their own?
E. What psychological marketing/influencing was involved in this scheme?
A. They were always more of a novelty gift rather than a child’s gift.
B. I was 12 when the trend hit and I had no desire to get one. Neither did my younger siblings.
C. N/A as my parents didn’t get me one.
D. The novelty of a gag gift that was pre-packaged.
E. That’s the million dollar question.
All the ones where the idea was to “just start something, grow grow grow, then figure out monetization later” is wild to me.
E.g. reddit. It worked. CEO is rich, site is still online. Somehow they got investors probably, presumably.
I get not having profit. I get not having income, if it’s in some prototype phase. But having no plan or idea whatsoever for how to monetize and still getting VC? Wild.
I get not having profit. I get not having income, if it’s in some prototype phase. But having no plan or idea whatsoever for how to monetize and still getting VC? Wild.
It’s called “growth-first” or “growth-at-all-costs” strategy. I don’t recall what video I was watching when I learned it, but it’s a dying strategy for business now (IIRC). It had its rise in popularity in the late 2000s to about 2018. Think Netflix, WeWork, Uber, etc. These are huge businesses to prop up, so they (literally) bank on the idea that with a huge user base, they can sooner or later, make a profit to make it worth all of the risk.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/
Enshittification. Once you learn it, you see it everywhere. It’s depressing.
Just curious about what does VC stand for, don’t know anything about business
venture capital. a group of investors with money who will put that money into promising companies so when it’s successful you make more money back.
Getting one of these sounds like the dream
Eh. it’s start up culture. They give the C suite 50 million dollars and want 100 million dollars in 10 years and they aren’t shy about going full Gordon Ramsay on anyone not 100% dedicated to that, even if you just get paid hourly to manage social media
The Gordon Ramsay anecdote is actually really good, in that in my experience VC’s get a LOT of say in what your business ultimately becomes.
I worked with someone that was, in all fairness, absolutely clueless about what they wanted, and wanted some VC alongside their rich parents money. The VC took a huge chunk of the business, and ultimately their business launched as something that was completely different to what they thought it would be - because that’s what the VC believed would give them some return. The business went bust in less than a year and launched for maybe 2 months?
Much like how Ramsay says “your Jamaican restaurant is shit, I’ve remade it into an Italian restaurant because there aren’t any nearby”, taking a lot of VC money almost certainly means they’ll want an equivalent say in your business. It’s not free money, and it absolutely fucks a lot of people up when they take that money and realise that their dream isn’t theirs any more.
Viet Cong. Bad news. Never get out of the boat.
venture capital / investor cash cannons
The original SMS version of Twitter.
Later, the name hashtags, in American English this symbol #️⃣ was
alwaysbest known as the pound key. It was also known as an Octothorpe.Actually I still don’t understand why anyone wants to use Twitter.
Not always, it was an octothorpe before phones
(says Octothorpe) Reaction
deleted by creator
The £ key on GB keyboards is shift+3.
Buying rights to provide telecom service to an area and not actually providing service.
Wait that’s a thing? In TV broadcasting?
I’ve heard of how Comcast Did New York state dirty many years ago. IIRC, they walked away with nearly half a billion dollars, which I believe was about 2/3 of all the money the state had given them to connect small towns and clusters of rural communities to DSL internet.>
Roblox. If you were there in the beginning then you know how empty it was. Now, that’s mostly what my son plays to what just make the most money/things? I don’t get it myself (I’m old, lol).
They knew what they were doing. They knew that Minecraft needed a strong competitor in the video game market, and bet big on the ‘long game.’
Noticing that you are a parent of a person who plays Roblox, I feel obligated to share two investigative videos about Roblox Corporation practices or lack thereof, the exploitive practices they have to paying third-party in-game content “developers” (that are often kids/tweens/teens), and the issues Roblox have had with pedophiles/adults grooming young people/kidnappings.
The following videos are from People Make Games on Youtube.
Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers
Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper.
[Just so we are clear, I am not telling you how to parent your son or person. I am just informing you to the best of my ability, about the issues that have arisen on and off Roblox.]
Appreciate the heads up. Will watch.
Making a social network where people can send pictures to each other, then selling it to a big corporation for billions.
Buying massive amounts of primetime commercial time to sell useless products by screaming their name over and over in the ad.
HEADON! APPLY DIRECTLY TO YOUR FORHEAD!
Man, those obnoxious TV advertisements can all fuck right on. It was even worse that it was a homeopathic (aka placebo effect) topical product.
Tupperware
Oooh. Wait.
