Just a tangent, but the 600m for advertising and 500m for product development is not a Netflix only thing, but it always pisses me off so much to read it.
That first number, the bigger number, is a black hole. Advertising is the worst, with its only competitor in my book being the legal system, industry in the industrialized world. It produces nothing of value, because all it tries to do it move money from predisposed destinations to the advertisers. It is buying market share, without making anything with the money. The later is actual productivity, goods and services people can use and want and experience and benefit from.
I'd go into another tangent about how advertisings size is out of control and it only gets worse due to how people are getting poorer on average (less money per individual) while wealth concentrates in the rich (ie, those that would own a company like Netflix) which means that when you rake in huge profits and a big money pot, what do you spend it on? Making goods and services is pointless if there is no money left in the market to explore your products and buy new things. Instead you throw those profits into advertising, into a non-productive discipline whose only job is to manipulate people into giving you money they would have spent elsewhere. But this post is already long enough that nobody is going to read it anyway!
What a colossal waste, everywhere advertising happens. And it is only on track to get worse.
That first number, the bigger number, is a black hole. Advertising is the worst, with its only competitor in my book being the legal system, industry in the industrialized world. It produces nothing of value, because all it tries to do it move money from predisposed destinations to the advertisers. It is buying market share, without making anything with the money. The later is actual productivity, goods and services people can use and want and experience and benefit from.
I'd go into another tangent about how advertisings size is out of control and it only gets worse due to how people are getting poorer on average (less money per individual) while wealth concentrates in the rich (ie, those that would own a company like Netflix) which means that when you rake in huge profits and a big money pot, what do you spend it on? Making goods and services is pointless if there is no money left in the market to explore your products and buy new things. Instead you throw those profits into advertising, into a non-productive discipline whose only job is to manipulate people into giving you money they would have spent elsewhere. But this post is already long enough that nobody is going to read it anyway!
What a colossal waste, everywhere advertising happens. And it is only on track to get worse.