[carls]

Although the author may be wrong about whether the 10-Ks he saw were the same ones being submitted to the government, I think his curiosity is still worth indulging.

Why did Netflix slowly stop designing their 10-K reports that lived on their own investor relation page?

My own guess is that there was some downward pressure to just produce the basic report, since that's all the government would see and investors wouldn't really value the design.

[breput]

If I had to guess (other than the general comings and goings of style), it would have been related to the increasing (mandated) usage of XBRL. The visual presentation was no longer as interesting as soon as you could extract the data in a machine readable format.

Except joke is on them because XBRL and the GAAP taxonomies allows "extension concepts" or tags(1) which basically means "we can make up our own reporting identifiers and you can't do anything about it" and makes categorizing accounting data very difficult across companies.

1: https://www.sec.gov/structureddata/gaap_trends_2019