What were they thinking? x 3
A few stories of spectacular failure to make you feel better about your own mistakes.
Can you ever have too many stories about Donald Trump’s Twitter knockoff crashing and burning?
The app’s woes have been well-documented: it’s been plagued with a clunky launch, tech problems, a stagnant user base, and an exodus of several of their top executives. Even Trump himself has offered only lackluster support for his own app, posting only one “Truth” — the app’s overly presumptive label for posts — on launch day.
[…]
Former First Lady Melania Trump posted ten “Truths,” all about a month ago, four of which are promoting a “POTUS TRUMP NFT Collection.” She has completely given up on Truth Social since then. It is difficult to determine the exact date of her posts since the app only designates them as “1mo,” presumably meaning one month ago.
At least Melania tried. Trump’s daughter/rumored favorite child Ivanka Trump doesn’t even have a Truth Social account. Searching for her name brings up fewer than two dozen accounts, several of which exist only to troll her or her father, often with misogynistic content.
[…]
Whether you love Trump or hate him, there’s just no reason to check out Truth Social. Overall, the pro-Trump content is duplicative of that available on other platforms. Trump himself isn’t posting. He isn’t even posting the press releases he’s been sending out since being excommunicated from Twitter. Those statements are emailed to supporters and media and spokesperson Liz Harrington posts them on both Twitter and Truth Social — again, no exclusive content on Truth Social and no reason for even the most ardent Trump supporter to check for posts.
And the trolls are anemic and unoriginal, most of them giving up after a single-digit number of posts because there’s no entertainment in trying to tell jokes to an empty room.
I try not to take pleasure in the misfortune of others, but there’s a long-standing Devin Nunes exception to that rule. Many people have torpedoed their careers by doing business with Trump, but this genius gave up a safe Congressional seat and a likely committee chairmanship if/when the GOP retakes the House of Representatives this fall.
Oh, well. Maybe Newsmax will hire him.
To be fair, Truth Social (and the other right-wing Twitter knockoffs like Parler and Gettr) are better than the real thing in one way: they don’t have the rabid homophobe who runs the “Libs of TikTok” account and hypocritical crybully Taylor Lorenz, and their respective minions, fighting it out. So there’s that.
I can at least understand why someone thought Truth Social might have succeeded. Had Trump actually bothered to post on it, it could have attracted a cult audience. In both senses of the word.
Honestly, most legendary failures at least had some rational idea behind them. The Edsel was meant to draw upwardly mobile buyers who were trading in entry-level Fords for fancier Buicks and Oldsmobiles. “New Coke” was a response to Coca-Cola losing market share - and blind taste tests - to Pepsi.
Then there’s CNN+. I have no freaking idea who and what that was for.
It’s taken Fox Nation, which has a built-in ideological fan base and strong anchor personalities, three years to amass 1.5 million subscribers. CNN+ was hoping to somehow attract two million subscribers in just one year despite the fact that they lack that same kind of base and their hosts are known more for being news readers than culture warriors like Tucker Carlson.
Per Axios, they’ve amassed 150,000 subscribers so far, which would be fine if they kept up that pace for the next 11 months. But I assume the way subscriptions typically work are with a big burst immediately after launch as the early adopters sign up, then a steep decline followed by a plateau unless and until buzzworthy content causes another uptick via word-of-mouth. There’s nothing very buzzworthy happening on CNN+ so far. So Warner Bros. Discovery execs presumably have concluded that they’re going to miss the annual target — badly — and have cut marketing spending for now rather than exacerbate their losses.
Now there’ll be a chicken-and-egg problem within the company. If CNN+ flatlines on subscribers, its supporters will blame its detractors for cutting off marketing while its detractors will blame its supporters for not building a more successful product out of the chute to warrant marketing.
There’s also a question of why CNN insisted on launching an expensive, dubious new platform so soon before the merger with Discovery. Axios claims that Discovery didn’t want to communicate internally with Warner Bros. before the deal for fear of attracting government interest, so they opted instead to say some discouraging things about CNN+ publicly in hopes that CNN would take the hint and postpone the launch. But they didn’t. I wonder: Did supporters of CNN+ rush the launch precisely so that it would happen before Discovery took over, believing that it’d be much harder for the new owner to shutter the platform once it was already on the air than to cancel it before it launched? It’s strange that the service went live before its app was available on Roku, no?
The fact that WBD has now slashed marketing spending raises the possibility that they’re going to shutter it anyway, which would make this a “New Coke”-scale debacle.
The difference is, there likely won’t be any conspiracy theories about CNN+ being deliberately designed to fail so people would miss the original more.
I guess it could have worked had a live stream of CNN been included in the service, to attract the cord-cutters. Apparently it wasn’t. But there was a book club with Jake Tapper.
Actually, with Tapper being one of the few halfway-tolerable American cable news hosts left, that might have been pretty good.
Netflix is not a failure, at least in terms of its cultural impact and number of subscribers.
But it no longer has the streaming market all to itself, and the strain is starting to show:
Netflix on Tuesday reported a loss of 200,000 subscribers during the first quarter — its first decline in paid users in more than a decade — and warned of deepening trouble ahead.
The company’s shares cratered more than 25% in extended hours after the report on more than a full day’s worth of trading volume. Fellow streaming stocks Roku, Spotify and Disney also tumbled in the after-hours market after Netflix’s brutal update.
Netflix is forecasting a global paid subscriber loss of 2 million for the second quarter. The last time Netflix lost subscribers was October 2011.
“Our revenue growth has slowed considerably,” the company wrote in a letter to shareholders Tuesday. “Streaming is winning over linear, as we predicted, and Netflix titles are very popular globally. However, our relatively high household penetration — when including the large number of households sharing accounts — combined with competition, is creating revenue growth headwinds.”
Netflix previously told shareholders it expected to add 2.5 million net subscribers during the first quarter. Analysts had predicted that number would be closer to 2.7 million. During the same period a year ago, Netflix added 3.98 million paid users.
Co-CEO Reed Hastings said the company is exploring lower-priced, ad-supported tiers in a bid to bring in new subscribers after years of resisting advertisements on the platform.
Netflix is the most expensive of the big streaming services, and unlike Disney and Warner it doesn’t have a massive arsenal of valuable IP to exploit. Yeah, it’s had some hits - Stranger Things, Ozark, Cobra Kai, and about eleventy billion true crime documentaries - but it doesn’t have Star Wars or Harry Potter. Paramount+ and Apple TV+ - seriously, is there a rule that ever streaming service must include “+” in its name? - don’t have as much well-known content, but they’re also being offered at bargain-basement prices.
So Netflix has to spend like a drunken politician to make its own content, lest they lose it to production companies and movie studios that want to put it on their own services, and they have to raise prices to pay for it. Which turns off some customers who might be happy to settle for Disney+ (see?) or the stuff included with their Amazon Prime subscription, because there’s only so much time to watch all of these “must-see” shows in the first place. Which might require further price increases. And so the cycle continues.
They are musing about cheaper ad-supported subscriptions, which might work, though I hope the ad placement isn’t as distracting as it is on Tubi. Really, I can see this ending with Netflix buying/being bought by/merging with Sony Pictures, with whom it has a content deal.
We’re likely going to see some consolidation among the streaming services eventually, because subscribing to three or four of them just isn’t feasible, especially if the kids are mostly watch people streaming video games on YouTube anyway. That will free up money for more important things, like premium Substack subscriptions.