this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
517 points (92.3% liked)
Technology
59593 readers
3043 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I straight up do not believe that a company can provide a service for over a decade and not be charging enough to be sustainable. The CEO can come and say this to my face and I'll call them a LIAR. One or a couple years I could buy the idea of investors holding it up for the sake of establishing the business, but why would they be accepting losses for such a long time? This is funky accounting. I'm more inclined to think "it was not sustainable, we need to charge more" is just something they say when they think they can get away with squeezing more money from customers.
I didn’t say they were operating at a loss, I said they were unsustainable. They’ve been profitable since 2003, but their profit relies on content. With everyone else pulling their content, their cash flow needs to be huge to produce content they can use to attract customers. $10 per subscriber isn’t enough income to sustain the cash flow needed to produce that much content, so they raise their prices to become sustainable. When they relied on licensing content from rights holders, their expenses were smaller, but they have been losing the ability to rely on that.