The Battle for Attention

During 1Q’17 Netflix earnings call, Reed Hastings mentioned something that raised some eyebrows or perhaps created a muffled laughter:

Think about it when you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night. You're really -- we're competing with sleep on the margin, and so it's a very large pool of time. (1Q’17 call)

While some may have thought that was a bit tongue on cheek comment back then, Hastings was really onto something. Of course, we all intuitively grasped this over time, but a new working paper that I came across during the holidays had more concrete evidence and some nuanced inferences. I have actually covered some of these findings before following the court’s verdict in favor of Meta against FTC’s lawsuit. But after going through the actual paper (and just the judge’s verdict), I think there are certain findings that are worth highlighting from the paper itself which can have interesting implications for Meta. I will discuss them behind the paywall.

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