I have a new opinion piece up on The Information, "Netflix’s Best Advertising Bet Won’t Require Software". 

I argue "Let the other streamers invest in precision-targeted digital ad delivery. The old network TV model may wind up being a better fit for the market leader."

It's an angle I had not considered in "Mark My Words, We Must Imagine Other Business Models for Netflix Than Advertising".

Going down the rabbit hole of Netflix's "less is more" approach to its business model - a ruthless focused on total subscriptions as its defining metric (now referred to as “members”) - the old network TV model of “non-targeted, highly limited, national advertising across very few breaks" is as simple a premium access model as one could imagine, and is more compelling than the complexities of ad targeting (which I still believe they won't pursue).

The Vibe Shift… “It’s All Happening”

“It’s all happening”.

In the middle of what has been an extraordinary week for the media news cycle (Netflix earnings miss, CNN+ killed off), a lawyer from Netflix’s APAC office posted my last opinion piece for The Information, “A Vibe Shift Is Brewing In Streaming”, and wrote:

The market's problem which Andrew Rosen describes in this article from a while back, is that no one really knows how to value a company like Netflix. Is it tech? Is it media? Is it something else? As the company branches out into gaming and maybe one day even more, the question of comps becomes an even harder one. Today the Street's decided that NFLX should be valued like an old school media business (IMO, wrong). Tomorrow - who knows?

It helped me to realize that the early signals of the “vibe shift” I had predicted are now gaining momentum. How do we think about these signals amidst the emerging chaos?