Fianchetto
+ Netflix
On October 23rd, 2020 Netflix released The Queens Gambit, a miniseries funded by them that follows the life of an orphan chess prodigy.
Check.
Just a month later it was rated as Netflix’s top scripted series ever. Not only did Nielsen rate it at the top for its streaming statistics, but by the end of November it had over 62 million households watch the complete series.
Check.
It’s clear that Netflix has doled out quite a bit of cash for this series (an undisclosed amount), however an even scarier fact is that they will never reap all the benefits for financially backing this series.
According to exploding topics, searches for “Chess Board” have gone up by 185% in the last three months. This means, Amazon, Walmart and all of their merchant vendors have seen an increase in sales through no doing of their own. What is clear is that there is a Netflix Effect. This is no different than the Oprah Effect - it was in fact proved when Toni Morrison, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, saw a spike in her sales for her respective books in 1996, 1998, 2000 and 2002, the same years they appeared in Oprah’s book club.
What I find odd in this age of hyper-information, digital tracking and such an attention to the psychometrics of the consumer, that a company like Netflix does not benefit financially for the billions of dollars they poor into content each year outside of their subscription model.
It seems like a small issue until you actually use a quick proxy that highlights the phenomenon. Take a look at the viewership in chess related content on Twitch, the streaming platform.
What all of this says to me is that Netflix has not only monetized its production, but also influences culture. This is monetization without proof of causation.
Imagine if I wrote a post about the Microsoft Arc mouse (that I have been using religiously for the past 4 years). I stand by it so much that I devote a full post to it. I create such a compelling case for this mouse that, in fact, you decide to trash your terrible Logitech mouse out the window in exchange for Microsoft’s newest Bluetooth model. And on a Tuesday morning, Microsoft sees a surge in visitors coming to their landing page routing from some obscure website titled BLACK MAN WHITE PAPER. If I had 1 million readers (which I don’t), I can assure you that Microsoft would cut me a piece of their revenues for the Tuesday spike in sales. Microsoft might also reach out to me to promote more of their products like their surface pro, or even their new keyboard.
In this day and age with promo codes and hyperlinks we still haven’t found a way to track true cultural influence. The kind of influence that has financial implications. The beneficiaries - search engines, chess board merchants, ecommerce platforms, SEO optimizers, media companies - have no quams in this because they move with the tide of culture. Whereas the culture originators, the Netflix's of the world, are cut out of the equation.
How then, do you measure cultural influence?
There are 7.8B people on the planet. 3.4B of them have access to the internet, a living stenography machine. Luckily, a bunch of smart people at Parrot Analytics have created a “Demand Expressions” statistic. It gathers data from search engines, social media, fan and critic sites, social video views, blogs, piracy downloads, streaming traffic, downloads, Wikipedia, on a per title, per country basis. All signals are then weighted and summarized. In other words, this very post is living proof that Netflix is influencing culture as it would count as a weighted demand expression. As is your time devoted to reading for this long on a post with the words “Netflix” in it.
I don’t consider myself a Netflix enthusiast. But it should be irksome to them that they are giving free marketing to chess retailers. Perhaps I’m missing the real picture here. It seems as though Netflix has no desire to monetize it's influence on the chess, checkers, exotic animal zoo visits or the record high visitation to the Lake of the Ozarks. Instead, their goal is to continuously, grow per user engagement. By doing this they drive retention, pricing power, and which continually feeds the flywheel that keeps giving. It dawned on me that Netflix actually doesn’t care who profits off of them, as long as it’s not another streaming service. The disposable income you set aside each month for Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD) must go to them. They’d much rather own a piece of your brain, than a piece of chess board sale.
Checkmate.