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Streaming giants have banded together for lobbying power
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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Netflix's 2023 2nd quarter revenue: 8.1 billion dollars BTW
Brace yourself for a tidal wave of corporate apologists rushing to point out that “revenue isn’t profit!,!”
The number you're looking for is $1.49 billion in net income for Q2 2023.
See? Clearly not profitable, need more ads
What's that? You want to share your four-screens-at-a-time account with three other people outside your house?
Fuck you, pay us more.
Profit is the portion of revenue that is stolen from workers and given to shareholders. Profit is bad. Revenue is good.
Unless you use that revenue to do stock buybacks, then it’s not considered profit but you still get to steal it from the workers. That way you can cry about unprofitability while all your shareholders and c suites crank up the exploitation of workers and consumers chasing “profitability” until the business collapses.
Which is crazy, right? If a stock sale allows an investment in a business, a stock buyback should be a paying off of that debt, freeing more revenue in the future to be used explicitly to pay workers who generate that revenue. How the fuck that is justified in instead enriching the value of other investments still held by other investors shows the selective use of the analogy by corporate interests and that the whole house of cards is just bullshit.
For the most part, it's not given to the shareholders, either. Dividends are pretty rare these days (which is when stocks largely went from being an ownership investment to - mostly - a form of gambling)
Anybody can look these numbers up. I'm not sitting on some secret Bloomberg terminal LOL
Then why only mention revenue?
Shareholders: "that's where you're wrong, bucko"
I didn't realize people can't do a 10 second google search on their own. 🙄
Net income isn't the whole story anyways, especially when this article points out that one of their costs is lobbying for a cause that isn't necessary. They're raking in billions of dollars every year.
"just Google it, bro" is never a source.
Not my fault you aren't capable of typing 4 words into a search engine.
It's not a 'source', bud.
🙄
Did you know profitability =! Net income?
Yes. Did you know that "just Google it, bro" isn't a source?
Positing a claim =! positing a source. That's 0/2.
You can't count, either? That's rough, buddy.
0/3
You specifically chose to quote a sentence about profit and then provide a number that is not profit. What was the point of commenting at all if the number you provided had no relevance?
My quote:
Your misinformed quote:
There's a very important difference there that I think you're not built to understand.
I'm not a shill as far as I know. What if I agree with them that it would have made more sense to mention profit #? Do I instantly become a "shill" too? If so, where can I get my check?
There is no definitive profitability number. Do you remember how the quote said profitability, and not profit? Companies scale their costs based on revenue. https://ycharts.com/companies/NFLX/stock_buyback
Seethe, shills.
...but it's not. And I really think people either don't understand that or they are intentionally misrepresenting the situation.
Being level-headed and fact-driven isn't "corporate apologist", it's how you maintain integrity and don't derail your own movement by being dishonest about shit that doesn't even matter.
It's like when Trump lies about his golf games. No one cares about his golf games but it makes you realize that if he's willing to blatantly and badly lie about something so trivial, he's probably also lying about absolutely everything else about him that might even remotely appear negative.
Plenty of people understand it, and some of them understand that profit is so malleable that it’s not really a useful measure of a company’s financial health. What really matters is how much they make over their essential production operational expenses. They can tailor their non essential expenses to seem as profitable or unprofitable as they want and use stock valuation tricks like buybacks to make money for shareholders regardless.
What does it matter if the company is profitable or unprofitable on paper when certain people can make lots of money off it either way? Twitter was “unprofitable” it’s entire life but somehow I bet the executives still got their bonuses, I doubt the shareholders were dissatisfied with their stock valuations or the buybacks, and it sure didn’t stop them from acquiring other companies.
Thank you for putting this more eloquently than I could. I must admit, I was losing my cool with people being irrational about this.
I don't know if people are ignoring expense scaling and stock buybacks or purposely choosing to hide it.
On a tangent, and nothing to do with you, but I don't like how these streaming companies are being called "streamers". Streamers are those people streaming on twitch, not a company like Netflix damnit.
To be clear, revenue does not equal profit.
Net income doesn't equal profitability either. Companies scale their costs, including stock buybacks, based on revenue. https://ycharts.com/companies/NFLX/stock_buyback