Here are some fun stats. What do they tell us?
– Netflix over the summer had 80 million customer accounts watch one of their Netflix Original Romantic Comedies.
– Netflix had 20 million streams for The Christmas Chronicles over the last weekend.
– Amazon Prime/Video/Studios had 14.7 million total customers watch an NFL Thursday Night football game.
– Snapchat had over 10 million viewers watch a Snapchat Original show this year.
At first blush, that’s a lot of data. And it’s big! You know, in terms of size, in that 80 million sure is a lot of people.
But let’s count the actual numbers released. One. Two. Three. Four.
Four numbers is not “big data”, in the data science sense. Data doesn’t get “big” until you reach the hundreds of thousands of data points. In fact, some data scientists would say data doesn’t really get big until you have millions of data points with many, many categorical variables.
Alas, as we ponder the bare handful of data points above, if we really pause to think on them, we understand how little we’re being told. Take the journalism “Five W’s”, who, what, when, where and why. Most data can’t tell us the why—it’s implied—but in streaming video it can tell us the other four.
When streaming video companies release single data points, they usually only give us two of the five W’s. First, they give us the “who”—customer accounts, customers or monthly active users. And they give us the “where” in the broadest sense possible in that they give us the “global numbers”. But crucially they always omit the “what”. How many minutes were viewed per person? The “when” is also usually implied, but not explicitly stated, usually so that the numbers are as large as possible. In the case of The Christmas Chronicles, they gave us the “what”, but left out the why.
As a result, usually we can learn very little as competitors, observers or investors from these nuggets. A contrarian might say, look here, Entertainment Strategy Guy, you said in this very early article that you LOVE data. At least these companies are providing us some data.
Well, I’ll dust off a great quote from statistics to counter that,
“The plural of anecdotes is not data.”
Netflix, Amazon and Snapchat—who are just the three companies I’m picking on today, Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, Hulu and Youtube do this too—aren’t providing data, they’re giving us anecdotes. Selectively curated data-based anecdotes in the hopes—that are almost always granted—that unsuspecting and unquestioning news outlets will repeat to boost their perception among customers, Wall Street and competitors.
And we always fall for it.
See, the companies above aren’t choosing between one or two data points. Or even a couple of dozen. These companies are literally choosing between millions of potential data points, which make these numbers some of the most selective anecdotes you could possibly come across.
The analogy (and yes it is in the title) is the old saw about the iceberg. 10% of the ice floats above the sea, with an even larger 90% below the water. This is how it feels when a streaming company drops their knowledge on us.
With streaming video, the numbers are even more extreme. They have millions of customers watching tens of thousands of videos with at least a dozen or more categorical variables per interaction. We’re talking thousands of potential ways to meaningfully slice the data, and the companies pick one or two per quarter. Again, the plural of anecdotes isn’t data.
The line is so close to the top of the iceberg, it may as well not even be touching it. That’s how much data we don’t have access to.
I have a new name for this. Even if you have a data point, that still isn’t “data”. It’s an anecdote. It’s a “datecdote”, an anecdote of data. Interesting, but not enough to base decisions off of.
Netflix, we’ve been told, isn’t an entertainment company, they’re a product company that leverages huge amounts of data to deliver us our entertainment. Maybe that’s true, for internal work. But when it comes to PR? Netflix isn’t a data company. They’re an anecdote company. They’re a datecdote company.
I’ve spent a lot of the last week polishing an article digging deep into the second most recent Netflix datecdote. My main conclusion is that at conferences or on investor calls or when choosing to publish press releases, as journalists we need to push back. We need at least the five W’s, and we need at least comparisons to put these datecdotes in context. Without those, and this is controversial, we just shouldn’t publish their number. I’m realistic enough to know this won’t happen, but we’d know a lot more if we did.
