Quibi's Marketing Shift
A quick bite of speculation about Quibi + NYT tries Reels' creator tools
Welcome back to Entertainment + Tech. Each week will cover an interesting way technology & entertainment are colliding and where things might go from here. The goal is to serve as the starting point for a conversation: we need more people who stand in both the entertainment and tech worlds if we’re going to build great products & create great content.
Having been at this a few weeks now, I really want to hear from any and all of you what you think of the newsletter. I’m especially curious to hear about interesting companies you think I should check out. You can respond to this email or reach out to me on LinkedIn.
A Certain Je Ne Sais Quibi
There’s been an interesting shift in Quibi’s marketing strategy from awareness about the service to awareness about their shows. I’ll explain why it makes a lot of sense (and I hope it works well for them), but I’m still not certain of the platform’s success.
Wherefore Art Thou Audience?
As a newsletter digging into two massive industries and how they’re changing, I have talked and will talk about strategy a lot. In my heart, though, I’m a product guy. The most brilliant strategy in the world means nothing if you don’t put together a product that supports it, and at the core of product development is the user. So, let’s talk a little bit about you.
You Are Awesome
Let’s face it, you’re great. You’re the reason for the whole circus. You’re the consumer. Every single person working on the film set, every platform engineer, every exec, actor, influencer, rodeo clown, every Jimmy Fallon and every Ninja, has a job because of you. You pay for them, either with your wallet, your data, or your attention–and many times, all three. [1] No matter how complicated the deals or how the money flows, it all comes down to you and what you watch.
Given how important you are, companies try very hard to build a relationship with you. [2] Getting you to 1) sign up for their product, and 2) stick around are two of the biggest priorities for any consumer company.
Audience Fragmentation
On the other hand, one of the biggest shifts over the past few years has been in the degree of audience fragmentation. Rather than congregating in big masses, audiences are getting split up into smaller pieces. There’s a couple factors here.
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings once half-joked that Netflix’s biggest competitor is sleep. The underlying point is serious, though: despite the ever growing amount of content and people who want to serve it to you, you remain a mere time-bound mortal with just 24 hours to spend in a day. Any time you spend on anything else is less time you can spend on a service/product/platform. [3] This notably includes time spent on other services–watching cable means not watching Netflix.
Along with the growth in watching options, changes in distribution [4] and discovery have led to a growth in willingness to put out shows that once might have been considered “too niche”–content doesn’t need to serve everyone anymore, and in fact, there’s now an advantage to being able to entice exactly the people who fit that niche and see its popularity grow to others besides. Bojack Horseman’s premise of cartoon horse + show biz inside-baseball + depression is not a likely pitch for broadcast, but it worked on Netflix. [5]
So what does this mean? For a creator who has unusual content, it’s more possible to get an audience than it used to be. For a new content platform, it’s a tough road ahead–how do you build a broad subscriber base amongst these niches when you’re already in a crowded competition for attention? [6] [7]
Let’s Focus on Quibi, People
Quibi’s approach is to try and claim slices of time where you’re less busy. The first-order reading would say, with short content that’s watchable on a bus or waiting at a dentist’s office, Quibi makes themself an option when Netflix & Hulu aren’t. Instead, they aim to compete against time-fillers like podcasts, scrolling through social media, and games like Candy Crush. With Quibi’s high production quality content, it should be a standout choice to spend your time with their shows.
I have a concern with this approach.
Time-Filling Habits
First: let’s assume that Netflix & co. actually are out of the picture on users’ commutes. [8] The competition from the time-fillers is still surprisingly strong. Product-wise, they’re very easy to jump into, & they keep users hooked with a treadmill of new content. It’s easy to form a habit where, when bored, users open them up and are quickly entertained.
With Quibi, it’s not as easy to just pick something to watch though. It certainly takes more consideration than opening up TikTok and getting instant entertainment. Quibi has tried to manage this by opening up on their own feed of nearly-full-screen recommendations, but giving me a description to see if I maybe want to watch it is not the same as immediately giving me the shiny thing. Also, Quibi plays an ad before the show, which just delays me the slightest bit more in getting to the good stuff.
Making me decide vs. dropping me right in
In the best case, I’m already in the middle of a Quibi show so I don’t have to think. That lasts for, say, 10 minutes x 10 episodes, and then after 100 minutes of using the platform (~3.5 average commutes), I need to pick another show. My favorite podcasts, on the other hand, might release 30 minutes of content weekly (or more), so I never have to think about picking something new to listen to. My standbys are always there. If my four regular podcasts put out 120 minutes of content total a week, that’s equivalent to me having to find a new Quibi show I want to watch every single week.
So, there’s one of the problems that focusing on marketing Quibi as a platform doesn’t solve. Quibi-the-platform is not what brings people back. It can only support the core, which is the content. Users have to know there are great shows, and it has to be extremely easy to choose what to watch next. Netflix has done this well by marketing their standouts heavily, to the point where everyone is talking about them, and Quibi could too. [9]
Related: Value for the Money
I’m not convinced that Quibi does well just by being a time-filler. $5/month isn’t much, but it’s still a barrier to overcome. If I already have other options for spending these in-between times and these times are a relatively brief part of my day, it’s a harder sell.
Even more striking to me here is the blaming of the pandemic for Quibi’s struggles—the thinking being that, if people aren’t going out, they’re not on their phones in the same way Quibi bet on. Even under non-pandemic circumstances, though, TikTok and Candy Crush see a significant portion of their usage at home. It turns out people are on their phones a lot everywhere, including at home, and they do spend a lot of time in their homes. Users still choose to use these products even with the full range of other options available. [10] This reinforces a user habit of going to them when bored, and it speaks to the strength of the competition for attention. [11]
Users have to love it enough to pay $5/month for it, continually. They have to love the content enough to talk about it to other people. No one is going to spread the word if a show is just fine enough to watch on a bus ride, and that wouldn’t convince me to start the service. [12]
Though it’s not the main use case they’re aiming for, I’d say that the bar for success is that Quibi’s service and content are good enough that people still choose to watch it at home.
Not All Doom and Gloom
That being said, these are within reach for Quibi. Netflix & Hulu had the advantage of a strong back catalog that users were already paying for while they took their risks with original content. Quibi had to build an entirely new catalog, with creators working in a new medium, [13] from scratch. It’s a risky move, but I wouldn’t say the current catalog is indicative of an inability to continue improving. It takes time & money to build a wide base of quality original content. If they’ve got the money to keep going (and once production gets started again), it’s solvable.
With better marketing of that quality content, it also gives Quibi an interesting foothold. It turns out users don’t just have one single niche they like–if you can bring them in with something specific they’ll love, they’ll try other things too. One killer show can be enough to bring people to the platform, where they hopefully find enough value in other shows to keep them subscribing. Quibi’s content is short enough that buying-in to a show that’s pretty good isn’t a huge commitment, so willingness to stick it through is probably high.
Having content that feels less like the empty calories of social media is an advantage. If Quibi does a good job of getting users into multiple shows that are regularly updating, and especially gets them to discover their next show while they’re more open to consideration (i.e., before they’re sitting on the bus bored) or markets a hit so well that users know they want to try it, they can build a strong habit that users don’t feel bad indulging in.
Also, I think the content model just makes sense, and I’d like it to become more popular. People do watch a lot of video on their phone, vertical video will only become more common, and the empty ground they’re filling in video length seems like a huge gap where the time commitment to watch is fairly low. [14]
I hope to see Quibi do big things. It’s exactly the kind of interesting bet I love that takes advantage of the growth of tech to do something new in entertainment.
––––––––––
[1] Sometimes you’re not actually paying enough for people to have jobs, and then we get MoviePass.
[2] I’ll probably talk about this at some point, but in the meantime, Stratechery often brings it up.
[3] Case in point, once the pandemic forced everyone to stay home, Netflix consumption shot up so high the EU had to ask them to cut their bandwidth by 25%.
[4] Subscription models were one of the biggest drivers. Growth in cable was an enabler of niche content, and streaming blew it wide open.
[5] I’m still surprised a fantasy show like Game of Thrones grew as big as it did, drawing 18M viewers in at its peak in the final season. That’s more in line with viewership for popular broad-appeal shows like Big Bang Theory (their finale drew 23M) & NCIS. Of course, the finale of M*A*S*H in 1983 drew 106M viewers (and after it ended, the synchronized toilet flush of pent-up NYC viewers shocked engineers).
[6] One answer is to play a different game and make a niche platform–Crunchyroll, Shudder, etc.
[7] This issue ended up too long, and I wanted to mention niches here since it’s important to audience fragmentation, but I’ll talk more about them in another issue.
[8] I have no actual data here, but I even question this. US commutes are ~30 min on average, and I also wouldn’t be surprised if people are broadly willing to start watching something even if they know they’ll need to pause in the middle. The argument might go that users still pick Quibi because that pain of stopping is lower, but seems shaky to me.
[9] It is worth noting that it’s relatively cheaper for Netflix to market a lot of their content. If a Netflix show has more minutes of content than Quibi, equivalent ad spend by Netflix gets them more watch time.
[10] That said, social media & casual games can be played while nominally doing other things at home. Watching a show (not just putting it on for background noise a la The Office for some viewers) takes more committed attention.
[11] A big problem the pandemic did cause is shutting down production. If Quibi needs to continue to put out new content and needs to react to the tastes of their users, they can’t until shooting becomes possible again.
[12] I have heard people recommend Most Dangerous Game, but still that’s usually within a larger discussion of Quibi, not an organic recommendation.
[13] They’re not the first people to make 10 minute serialized content, but web series don’t put nearly this kind of money and talent behind it, so I think it’s fair to call this a different game.
[14] There’s a lot more that can be said about Quibi, their product, their content, but this is already longer than I wanted. They are a really interesting company, and I’m sure I’ll mention them more in future weeks.
Reel Time Editing
Last week, I touted the importance of creator tools in TikTok’s success and briefly mentioned Instagram’s Reels. A few days ago, NYT’s Brian Chen & Taylor Lorenz tested Reels themselves, and they panned it. Turns out one of the biggest problems they highlighted was how much harder it is to create a good video:
Taylor: With TikTok, I can post a fun video of my day in under 15 seconds. Reels took me about five minutes.
Some people do spend an enormous amount of time editing their TikToks and making these really complicated and amazing videos. But for me, just a casual user who uses TikTok to capture fun highlights from my day-to-day life, that’s the time frame.
Brian: As an Instagram user, I see no benefit to using Reels as opposed to Stories for posting videos. It’s extremely confusing for even us to use, which means it’s going to be much more confusing for casual tech users.
That’s not to say the awkwardness of the tools is an impossible hole for Reels to pull out of, since they can continue to improve them. However, there is a window of opportunity here for Instagram if TikTok goes down, and they could miss it.
Thanks for reading Entertainment + Tech. I’d love to hear your feedback and ideas. You can respond to this email or reach out to me on LinkedIn. If you know someone else who would enjoy this newsletter, please share it with them!