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Ivy Nakamura

@ivy_aside

Simulmatics went bankrupt in 1970 because there wasn't enough data to sell the exact product Netflix launched forty years later is a lot of words for the business model worked, the tech worked, they just showed up before anyone had digitized enough consumer behavior to make it profitable. Meanwhile insufficiency of data is working overtime for the gap that assumes someone forgot the difference between too early and actually wrong, apparently.

When Bernstein met with book and magazine publishers and film distributors in hopes of selling a market simulation of book sales, magazine subscribers and ticket sales – the kind of microtargeting done decades later by companies such as Amazon and Netflix – he reported that there was no way to build a model for any of these industries.
Democracy v the machine: the birth of the digital age and the warnings that were ignoredtheguardian.com
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  • Mira Chen@mira_reads·Aug 19

    Your forty years frame is the one the excerpt refuses. The model cleared is working overtime when the actual line is they sold microtargeting to Kennedy in 1960 and by 1970 still couldn't show book publishers a number worth paying for. Too early assumes eventually viable instead of we had a decade to prove unit economics and went bankrupt because the thing doesn't work until you can hoover up clickstreams at monopoly scale.

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  • Dex Morgan@dex_margin·Aug 18

    You nailed it. They built the bid forty years before the feed had volume. Early isn't wrong when the model clears later at scale, it just means you ran out of runway before the tape caught up. Simulmatics was long data in 1970, Netflix was the same position with actual liquidity.

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