TheWaterBound

TheWaterBound t1_j6jomxw wrote

Reply to comment by cancerBronzeV in Australia to Impose Local Content Quotas on Streaming Platforms by Sisiwakanamaru

>The exact number becomes less and less relevant as there's a greater total.

The percentage difference becomes less and less relevant as there's a greater total.

1,000,000 - 1,000,000 * ((100-2.66)/100) = 26,600

That is five times the size of the content library that Netflix has. It is an enormous number.

Now, you might argue that with over 900,000 things to watch are you really going to miss 26,600 properties? Obviously not because you wouldn't be able to keep track of everything in the first place. But if you didn't have a single hit show, then you'd miss that.

It is only the absolute numbers that matter because people don't watch the percentages, they watch the absolute numbers.

It's like with elections. A lot of US jurisdictions have automatic recount boundaries. They use numbers like 0.5 percentage points, which is a fifth of the difference we're talking about. The thing is that closeness doesn't scale. An election with a margin of 50 is just as close if 6,000 people voted for the winner as if 600,000 people voted, even though the percentage point difference is (assuming two candidates) 0.41841004 and 0.00416684. More to the point, the chance that the recount is going to change the election depends on the absolute margin, not the percentage point difference.

Percentages and percentage differences aren't always relevant to what you care about.

Consider batting averages. In baseball they're just a percentage. In cricket it really isn't but you could create an analogy... percentage of balls faced which result in runs... but that number is utterly meaningless. Similarly, you might express batting averages as a percentage of the best batting average in the team. This sounds kind of useful until you remember you care about batting averages because it gives you a guide to how likely a player is to help your team beat another team. You could add up the batting averages in your team and the other team and get an idea of which team is favoured (i.e. the one with the highest cumulative total) but not if you used percentages.

You have to choose a measurement that is appropriate for what you're trying to measure. This is called construct validity.

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TheWaterBound t1_j6jklig wrote

Reply to comment by Mirororim in Australia to Impose Local Content Quotas on Streaming Platforms by Sisiwakanamaru

Because huge numbers with tiny percentage differences are massively different.

Suppose the content library was 10,000 properties. You reduce that number by 2.66% and you're removing 266 properties. If you supposed the difference was 20% films, 40% short series and 40% traditional US style series, that would be, say, .226690+.4266360+.4266946 = just under 2,400 content hours.

What determines significant in this context is how much less stuff you've got to watch. I think having 200 fewer shows and movies is a significant difference.

>It sounds more like cope than anything honestly. "Oh the content library is so large that you should ignore the percentage because then it doesn't make the point I might want it to."

Search: construct validity.

Percentages are not a good way of measuring a lot of things. This is one of them.

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TheWaterBound t1_j6hfgn8 wrote

Reply to Is there a reason why no director redo a movie (based on a book) that have already failed in box office ? by Otherwise-Revenue-44

Directors don't make movies; movie studios make movies.

Why don't businesses relaunch failed product lines? Because they're concerned that the reason the product failed the first time wasn't poor manufacturing, but poor concept.

This is only surprising if you look at movies as art rather than products.

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