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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35893 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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I'm not really sure a single business insider article from a single analyst (and, iirc business insider leans more towards the content-farm style where anyone can write an article - not that it'd be much more credible in the NYT opinion section) is enough to conclude it's a "serious misfire". (even the article itself says things like "Still, Forte is now trying to quantify the risks to Amazon if the show isn't a megahit" - if it was surely a misfire, why would it say "risks if isn't megahit"?)

The article itself is light on numbers, and I'm not sure what "worsening performance with every episode" means (won't that always happen? nobody is going to pick up episode 5 without watching 1 first), but I don't think this is enough. Same for "they literally staked the future of their whole studio on this show" - could be true, but what precisely does that mean, source?

Finally, 'tom forte, analyst at D.A davidson' comments a lot to the media on a variety of stocks and companies. In general, aren't the reports of those people often unreliable, given both the intrinsic difficulty of assessing the future performance of large companies, and that readers or viewers rewards 'being interesting' more than 'accuracy'? ("If their stock picks were good, they'd be buying them / working at a fund that did, and not telling you")

Just as a gauge of the fan response, House of the Dragon gets on the order of 3-4x as many comments for each episode thread on /r/television than Rings of Power. Similarly on their main respective subreddits (/r/houseofthedragon and /r/lotr_on_prime) participation is about 4-5x higher on the former. For example the "no book spoilers" thread for HotD episode 5 has 11,399 comments at the moment, compared to the no spoilers thread for RoP episode 5 which has 2,586.

At least on reddit it's obvious what is driving more organic fan participation.

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