[makeitdouble]

It's interesting how many corporations don't actually "run the numbers" on what we think are important issues. Basically, internal focus and what the rest of the world cares about are disjointed and corps are often blind to obvious aspects. This can be improved by strong internal diversity, but Netflix doesn't look like a bastion of that (yet?)

On "just ok" vs stuff actually enjoyable, "just ok" is fine until there is no better competitor for attention (e.g. a new smartphone game takes over the world). If they get to fit on the "actually enjoyable" scale instead, there is a better chance for people to keep their subscription, sometimes even if they end not viewing anything that month for whatever reason.

[bcrescimanno]

Former Netflix employee (2010-2013) here and, if there's one thing Netflix does as well or better than anyone in the industry, it's running the numbers. In particular, in those days, we had two key metrics that were strongly correlated and we would attempt to drive up: Streaming hours and account retention. Higher usage was strongly correlated with account retention to the point that they were the core of nearly every experiment we did.

[makeitdouble]

I think these are reasonable numbers to focus on, but other relevant variables could be just too hard to quantify or set as goals...

For instance how Netflix's catalog is attractive to new users/markets can be checked in regular polls, but it would be way more difficult to follow with fine granularity, far less precise, and ultimately a harder to handle number than just retention or number of new accounts.

This means Netflix could see decent growth on its numbers, good retention and a steady flow of new accounts created, while struggling to reach new markets where competitors are doing great.

This is an extreme example, but Blackberry typically had very good user retention and users loved their devices. Looking only at these numbers, they were doing fine for a long time (which is nothing to sneeze at)

[bawolff]

Wouldn't this be a short term vs long term optimization thing? In the short term "just ok" wins. In the long term, users might get bored and new users are less likely to join. Or at least that's my gut feeling, i have nothing to back it up.

[ichik]

Not necessarily, the power of habit can be very strong.

The users who only watch a couple of things are the ones who are more likely to “get bored”, because in any given month there is a higher chance that there won't be any single thing they'd want to watch. Whereas someone who just does it regularly (say every day after work while eating dinner or w/e) is more likely to keep that habit.