How does Netflix manage to manage viewers so well?

Today's Netflix is ​​geared toward changing behavior through storytelling. There are three reasons for this.

Six years ago, Netflix released a pilot series of "The House of Cards " by David Fincher. It was the first of the so-called “original” series created and produced by Netflix itself. Since then, the company has released hundreds of successful shows and films, including the already very iconic “ Very Strange Things ”, “ Eighth Sense ” and “ Narco ”. Today it is clear that Netflix influenced our culture, changed the entertainment industry and made Hollywood shudder.

In the last months of 2018, Netflix released Bird Box with Sandra Bullock, which was watched by 80 million households (that's 58% of all subscribers) and “ You ”, seen by 40 million (29%). It seems Netflix has mastered the mass production of successful and exciting stories .

Ben Bajarin from TechPinions believes that Netflix works on a “history as a service” scheme (Story as a Service, by analogy with other “as a service” models), and in this area it is far ahead of all competitors. The Netflix show is like a book: it makes you read, swallowing one chapter after another. The remaining TV channels - HBO, CBS, ABC and others - only release a series of stories connected by a single storyline. If you look at it like this, Bajarin concludes, Netflix doesn't have many competitors besides Amazon, Disney, and Apple.

I see three main reasons why Netflix is ​​so cool on the shows.

[1] User obsession is in a good way. Gibson Beadle, former vice president of product management at Netflix, said that the key to Netflix's product success is an obsession with the user and his enthusiasm. The company makes decisions based on consumer science, works with data, conducts research, surveys and A / B tests of new ideas. Netflix is ​​trying to identify and satisfy non-existent, future user needs - and increase the delight of its subscribers in the long term. In the process, the company creates new market niches and increases its margins . Netflix recognizes that its main goal is user attention.

In the US, we won about 10% of the television screen time, and mobile - and even less. In other countries, our share is even lower, as the penetration of our service is lower. We select consumer screen - television or mobile - time from completely different competitors. We challenge (and lose) Fortnite rather than HBO. [...] Our growth is based on the quality of impressions of Netflix, which is compared to all other user experiences. We focus not on Disney +, Amazon and others, but on how we can give our subscribers the best experience. - Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO

[2] Storytelling: story telling . The Netflix show — with a lot of plot twists, understatements, multi-part storylines — is linked to the company's main metric — a user subscription. On television, content is secondary, it is created to maximize profits from advertising on the air. Netflix wants its users to get better content, and it works just as well as marketing campaigns.

[3] Metrics . Netflix is ​​known for its unusual metrics . For a subscription service, focusing on increasing the number of new users and retaining old ones is common. But it is sometimes difficult to calculate these parameters.

• Netflix measures success in “ valuable hours ” - a variant of “watched hours” that counts the proportion of time that a user spends behind the screen. This shows us that the time subscribers spend on Netflix is ​​not an end in itself for the company. Netflix wants users to watch more movies that really matter to them. This metric is associated with a long-term subscription.
• Pleasure is another metric of Netflix. It also does not look like traditional metrics like user satisfaction or consumer loyalty index (NPS). Previously, the company measured the quality of content on a five-star scale, but at some point it switched to a binary assessment of “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”, which can be given at the end of the show. Combined with a user profile, this data allows Netflix to predict the likelihood that a subscriber will enjoy a particular show.

In general, Netflix is ​​one of the leading tech companies that has made behavior change the basis of its success. Her key techniques are consumption science, a grocery approach and storytelling.

Text: Alexey Ivanov, Diana Letskaya @ 757nf
Community: @ponchiknews