I "participated" in a less nefarious strategy. In 2010, when the collection of short stories "Machine of Death" was about to be released, the editor Ryan North asked us not to pre-order. Instead, he suggested that we all wait and purchase the book on the same day from Amazon.
The strategy worked -- the book was #1 in its category that day, which certainly led to increased sales over time. Probably didn't hurt that it's a superb book.
(Ryan North is also the author of the popular webcomic "Dinosaur Comic".)
I remember reading that Scientology did this with their books. Bookstores were complaining because the "new" books arriving would have previous price tags on them.
While reading this I wondered how they ended up at a box office of $25,488. Did they really spent $25,488 and consider it as a "small fee" to be the first in box office?!
If I interpret the information about "four-walling" correctly, they actually paid the Cinema a much smaller fee to get all seats, but can then report all money they make of these seats as Box Office earnings.
The Westhampton Beach Theater has 425 seats [1]. 425 Seats * 5 viewings * $12 a ticket actually ends up at $25,500 or $25,488 if they did not report 1 ticket for whatever reason. As "any money they make off seats goes straight into their pockets", I suspect they simply sold the tickets of the 425*5 seats they rented for a flat fee for $12 a seat to themselves and reported that as Box Office.
When they ‘four wall’, they pay a single fee to rent the entire cinema (the ‘small fee’ they paid to a friendly cinema owner.
They then ran 5 viewings.
So they are claiming being sold out for each of the viewings. (5 * seat capacity * ticket price), but didn’t actually pay themselves for all the tickets (no revenue - small fee = small loss)
To me it sounds like they basically just lied to the maintainers of the BoxOfficeMojo list, because it’s a list of revenue, and their movie did not create any revenue at all, even though they rented a cinema and did five screenings, nobody paid to see the movie.
I spoke with Eric a few months ago to help give a few pointers when he was considering the idea for this movie. He saw some of the media surrounding "Monero Means Money," our film that we put together from idea to theaters in a week. I explained how I cold called theaters who were very willing to show unusual movies at this time while they have essentially no revenue.
For us, getting a movie on the charts was more of a logistics challenge than anything, and I assume it was the same for him. Congrats to Eric and everyone else involved for topping the charts!
It's a story repeated ad nauseam, but the founder of Zoom came from Cisco, after having been in charge of WebEx there. Cisco had refused to let him do what he saw needed done to radically improve WebEx, and so he left and created Zoom and did it there.
Cisco just saw a product that was successful at the time, and a senior exec that wanted to spend a lot of money to ultimately still only have video conferencing software. They were wrong with their decision, but it's an entirely understandable one.
Zoom is still in "growth phase" which means they aren't under a lot of pressure to turn a profit at this particular moment. So they proactively offered their free service to schools, the free tier isn't time-limited, plus their corporate product is basically the same as the consumer/free product.
And on the other side, Google was totally caught napping and assumed that everyone knew about Meet. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/technology/zoom-rivals-vi... "[Google’s chief business officer] Mr. Schindler tried placating the engineer’s concerns, the people said. Then his young son stumbled into view of the camera and asked if his father was talking to his co-workers on Zoom."
I would say the most important part, and where every company has shot themselves in the foot is the need for an account. With Zoom you can join meetings with just a link/code, and while it may seem trivial to us thats a huge plus for nontechnical people.
That and the fact Zoom had seamless integration with large meetings with relatively little-to-no performance/quality costs is a huge benefit. The luck of timing & advertising is what pulled it all together.
I would really like to know what went wrong with Google especially. They've had years to develop Hangouts and Meet, yet it's so, so behind in both performance and quality. Are both of these products just riddled with technical debt to the point that these improvements take significantly longer than normal?
I doubt it's anything more than the cyclical nature of trends, and chance. There was already a movement away from Zoom to platforms that were less closed, but then the pandemic happened.
One vaguely related thing is the 1953 jukebox hit, "Three Minutes of Silence" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3OSg2ehHbs which delivered on its promise. (It doesn't seem to have a WP page yet. Does anyone know of a WP-friendly source of information on it?)
- Unfriended - Dark web (2018, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4761916/)
aren't you thinking of this one instead? I've seen it and it was pretty good. When I saw your comment I was like, no way it was from 2014.
"So they pay a flat fee to the theatre..." "In that sense, "we made a slight loss" on the movie, Mr Tabach said." Oh, so it's not a $0-budget movie.
I suppose they probably get at least that much value in free publicity from articles like these and us talking about them online. Now they can pitch their next project as coming from the brilliant minds of chart-topping filmmakers. Bravo to some guys that figured out how to game the system a little. I hope enough people rent the movie to get their fee back.
Note that the movie's actual production cost / budget was indeed $0.
In order to then get to the top of this particular list on IMDB - by showing the movie in an actual cinema - that bit cost some small number of $'s, according to TFA.
It seems like it would be possible to hack the charts during normal times. It may involve renting a stadium, designating it a movie theatre and playing the movie 24h straight (then every 10K seats could create 10k seats * 10$/seat * 10 showings per day = 1 Million $ in revenue).
This is quite brilliant, and also instructive. They saw a corner case and took advantage of it.*
But when you're starting a company this is a danger: you might get some initial traction but is your growth all in a corner case? This is almost a restatement of the "early adopter" cohort in "Crossing the Chasm".
Dominating a niche isn't alway bad BTW -- FB's niche was college students, who could evangelize and grow the overall market.... though notice that FB is pretty much nonexistent in that niche today.
* I mean this in a good sense: "exploit" and "take advantage of" often imply something shady.
> Two filmakers paid $25,488 to buy all seats for 5 screenings of their $0 production budget movie
The film studio usually gets the majority of the ticket sales for a movie, so even if they didn't have connections it would cost them much less than a normal person to rent out the theater.
> Arrangements vary, but the movie studio usually ends up with about 60 percent of the proceeds from American box offices.
> ...
> That figure varies according to the usual supply and demand principles — an extremely hot first-run movie may start out with distribution fees up to 90 percent (in other words, 90 percent of the fees during that time are going back to the studio). As the film stays in distribution longer, the fees go down since demand goes down until eventually the theater replaces it with a different film.
Did it cost them that much? I think it wasn't clear on that point. It looks like they rented the theater out for a fixed fee (since they have connections to the theater let's say it was $100). Then they can sell tickets and they get to keep the money for selling said tickets. So they sell tickets to themselves for $25,488. According to the theater that's the profit for the movie, and they're only out of pocket $100.
I suspect the $25,488 was so low to keep it believeable.
[+] [-] koolba|5 years ago|reply
The key innovation is realizing how cheap it would be to make it to the top with nearly every theater in the USA closed.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/02/22/heres-...
[+] [-] teach|5 years ago|reply
The strategy worked -- the book was #1 in its category that day, which certainly led to increased sales over time. Probably didn't hurt that it's a superb book.
(Ryan North is also the author of the popular webcomic "Dinosaur Comic".)
[+] [-] x87678r|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m463|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ascar|5 years ago|reply
If I interpret the information about "four-walling" correctly, they actually paid the Cinema a much smaller fee to get all seats, but can then report all money they make of these seats as Box Office earnings.
The Westhampton Beach Theater has 425 seats [1]. 425 Seats * 5 viewings * $12 a ticket actually ends up at $25,500 or $25,488 if they did not report 1 ticket for whatever reason. As "any money they make off seats goes straight into their pockets", I suspect they simply sold the tickets of the 425*5 seats they rented for a flat fee for $12 a seat to themselves and reported that as Box Office.
[1] https://whbpac.org/general-information/
[+] [-] xcavier|5 years ago|reply
When they ‘four wall’, they pay a single fee to rent the entire cinema (the ‘small fee’ they paid to a friendly cinema owner.
They then ran 5 viewings.
So they are claiming being sold out for each of the viewings. (5 * seat capacity * ticket price), but didn’t actually pay themselves for all the tickets (no revenue - small fee = small loss)
[+] [-] reaperducer|5 years ago|reply
According to the TV news this morning, yes, they did buy all of the tickets themselves.
Which kinda makes the "$0 Budget" headline a little iffy. $0 to make the film. But $26k to achieve their goal.
[+] [-] sorbits|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sgp_|5 years ago|reply
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgewky/how-a-random-guy-m...
For us, getting a movie on the charts was more of a logistics challenge than anything, and I assume it was the same for him. Congrats to Eric and everyone else involved for topping the charts!
[+] [-] DevKoala|5 years ago|reply
How did Google, Microsoft, Cisco, etc get it so wrong all of these years?
[+] [-] Twirrim|5 years ago|reply
Cisco just saw a product that was successful at the time, and a senior exec that wanted to spend a lot of money to ultimately still only have video conferencing software. They were wrong with their decision, but it's an entirely understandable one.
[+] [-] sp332|5 years ago|reply
And on the other side, Google was totally caught napping and assumed that everyone knew about Meet. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/technology/zoom-rivals-vi... "[Google’s chief business officer] Mr. Schindler tried placating the engineer’s concerns, the people said. Then his young son stumbled into view of the camera and asked if his father was talking to his co-workers on Zoom."
[+] [-] manjalyc|5 years ago|reply
That and the fact Zoom had seamless integration with large meetings with relatively little-to-no performance/quality costs is a huge benefit. The luck of timing & advertising is what pulled it all together.
[+] [-] marcod1419|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heavyset_go|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chadcmulligan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FirefoxIsSlow|5 years ago|reply
Cisco charges money.
Google discontinued their video/messaging services too many times for people to get used to.
Heck for a moment I thought "Houseparty" was going to be a new social media, but I think their push notifications were too annoying.
[+] [-] leoc|5 years ago|reply
Here's a Spotify playlist of various (apparently) silent tracks, useful for inserting pauses/silent intervals into Spotify playlists as (AFAICT) there isn't any other way to do so. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4fN5YP4n8aGCSS4j3MQoeo?si=... .
[+] [-] david_draco|5 years ago|reply
- Searching (2018, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7668870/)
- Unfriended (2014, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3713166/)
[+] [-] geoffreyy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] parsimo2010|5 years ago|reply
I suppose they probably get at least that much value in free publicity from articles like these and us talking about them online. Now they can pitch their next project as coming from the brilliant minds of chart-topping filmmakers. Bravo to some guys that figured out how to game the system a little. I hope enough people rent the movie to get their fee back.
[+] [-] Jedd|5 years ago|reply
Note that the movie's actual production cost / budget was indeed $0.
In order to then get to the top of this particular list on IMDB - by showing the movie in an actual cinema - that bit cost some small number of $'s, according to TFA.
[+] [-] ant6n|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hirundo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ARandomerDude|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allarm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swanson|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gumby|5 years ago|reply
But when you're starting a company this is a danger: you might get some initial traction but is your growth all in a corner case? This is almost a restatement of the "early adopter" cohort in "Crossing the Chasm".
Dominating a niche isn't alway bad BTW -- FB's niche was college students, who could evangelize and grow the overall market.... though notice that FB is pretty much nonexistent in that niche today.
* I mean this in a good sense: "exploit" and "take advantage of" often imply something shady.
[+] [-] quickthrower2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peter303|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] row_number|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.instagram.com/curfew_calls/
[+] [-] ansible|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chaostheory|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamyourcattle|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] flak48|5 years ago|reply
Which turned out to be more money 'earned' than any other movie in the US that day, allowing them to top the charts as the highest grossing movie.
Edit: whoops, looks like I may have misunderstood and they probably didn't pay that much, as replies to this comment are pointing out
[+] [-] nordsieck|5 years ago|reply
The film studio usually gets the majority of the ticket sales for a movie, so even if they didn't have connections it would cost them much less than a normal person to rent out the theater.
> Arrangements vary, but the movie studio usually ends up with about 60 percent of the proceeds from American box offices.
> ...
> That figure varies according to the usual supply and demand principles — an extremely hot first-run movie may start out with distribution fees up to 90 percent (in other words, 90 percent of the fees during that time are going back to the studio). As the film stays in distribution longer, the fees go down since demand goes down until eventually the theater replaces it with a different film.
https://theweek.com/articles/647394/when-buy-movie-ticket-wh...
Given that the theaters were completely empty at the time, I'm sure they could have negotiated some pretty good rates.
[+] [-] shaftway|5 years ago|reply
I suspect the $25,488 was so low to keep it believeable.
[+] [-] heavyset_go|5 years ago|reply