It’d probably go over better than a konk on the noggin with a coke bottle. One does wonder how MST3K would be perceived outside of a western cinema-going audience: would they be annoyed by the riffing? I’m going to bet they’d be more excited about the host segments… maybe robots might be out of their milieu (or maybe not), but the wacky hijinks are easy enough to get into.
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So much of the show is based on North American English-speaking entertainment culture that to go into other markets it would have to be so extensively rewritten that it may as well be another show entirely.
So, yeah, 7.96 billion is probably not the right target number. We could launch a major campaign to enforce this cultural worldview upon everyone, but 1) that’s pretty much genocide, which is a bad thing, and 2) that sounds like a heck of a lot of work!
So let’s go with 222 million, which is the combined population of the United States and Canada reduced 40% because I figure a healthy number of people just won’t get it, plus it’s easy to remember with the repeating digit.
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Shoot, we just need a million at $7.99 a month.
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Have heard variations on that and if you’ve done email or social media marketing you’ve probably seen it’s absolutely true: it’s just really hard to track how many times a customer has heard about your service before finally clicking that link AND putting in the credit card information. Even harder to track what finally made the difference 
(A/B testing, Google Analytics and sales funnels, I knew them Horatio)
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Assuming that is even a meaningful question when you are talking about a cumulative process. To put it another way, the one straw may have broken the camel’s back, but it could have been any piece of straw that did it, as long as there were bazillions of pieces of straw there already. That one just happened to be the last straw.
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Yeah the problem I’ve seen with marketing teams is that they really zero in on that last view/impression before the purchase, not at all considering that the person probably already made the decision to buy and just clicked on the next link they saw (or purposefully sought out that link). Unless the link was “now 50% off” or similar, no content there was likely the tipping point. But they are always like “see? The previous ad used a contraction, but the last one wrote out ‘cannot’ therefore we need to remove all contractions from our marketing campaigns.”
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Almost as if they’re just guessing and trying to find a way to justify their paycheck.
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It’d be interesting to let some of the high-iq boys with the stats and the fancy mathematical models try to model this problem. Unfortunately I can’t imagine that actually using the maths to get a better idea of what is driving sales would work if all they collect is where the person immediately came from. Still, they could maybe put some confidence intervals around where in the system a tipping point might have been reached, or how often it will be identified correctly using the data that is collected.
Sadly, I bet most of the people who can do this have better things to do. I’m looking at you, internet…
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Oh, all the visit data is collected, I’m just saying that all too often the history is ignored and only the last click is considered. And I’d say the people with actual stats knowledge (aside: in my experience they are usually women) use all the data for analysis, and some executive ignores their work and goes with a gut feeling.
But I think it most often comes down to repeated exposure: it doesn’t matter what the actual messages contained, just that they were seen multiple times. And I’m sure someone’s figured out the optimal intervals a la a spaced repetition learning model. Something like “twice the first week, three times the second week, no views for week three, and in week four they’ll most likely purchase with one or two views.”
Come to think of it, if anyone’s got a good general algorithm, it’s probably Facebook. So instead of doing the analysis on your own, you could just take note of when you see repeated ads in your feed and determine if they follow such a pattern.
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Great to know, thanks! I watch Pluto TV every now and again but ironically not the Rifftrax or MST3K channels since I have all those on a TV-attached hard drive.
However I have started using the Gizmoplex for re-watching old episodes of MST3K and it’s been great especially because they have closed captioning which I leave on and here I am a quarter of a century+ after the episodes aired still finding hilarious riffs I never noticed before.
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You’re right on that. I work in radio and that’s party of the reason why we push for high frequency schedules. 30 times in a week is a lot, but it might take them a month to hear it those eight times and three months for them to act on it.
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The more I think about the cancellation of MST3K by Netflix, and the more I think of the Gizmoplex… the more it reminds me of this, for some reason:
“I’ll make my OWN MST3K! With snakes, and sampos!”
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And at $1,000,000 a month, we only need 7.99 people! I’m not sure what we are gonna do with that other .01 of a person, but I like the way you think!
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I can only speak for myself of course, but at $149 (or whatever the annual sub is for the Gizmoplex) it is not a huge ask for me as a fan of the show. But the average person is probably going to be wondering where all the “new content” is for such a price. A different streaming service like Disney+ or even Netflix will be churning content for subs of the same general level while the Gizmoplex will have 1 new movie a month (or so) and the rest of the content is the library.
So the fans will do it because they already agree to the value formula. I expect that the majority of other folks will be less convinced that the value is there. They’ll be more inclined to ‘rent’ new eps on an ad-hoc basis (if they do anything at all).
The population of dedicated fans will probably provide at least a partial ‘baseline’ of income, but won’t be enough to push the Gizmoplex into a zone of broad appeal. What will be needed is (A) some ‘big name’ movies that can be marketed to more general audiences to gain awareness and (B) some sort of additional content to make a monthly sub more appealing to people who aren’t fans.
I’m not saying I know how to solve that riddle. 
I’m just calling it like I see it.
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I’m glad to see the topic come up as it’s also crossed my mind. If the Gizmoplex model is sustainable assuming the same number of backers converts to a recurring subscription revenue base, I hope to see this continue for years to come.
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Okay, 36,581 Backers at $7.99 a month is $292,282.19. Just a little shy of the $300,000 per episode budget mentioned in the Kickstarter campaign.
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Did you have the ghost of Benjamin Franklin helping you out with this?
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Yo, in the right light, l LOOK like Benjamin Franklin!
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But seriously, folks, my point is that millions, or even hundreds of thousands of subscribers isn’t necessary. Just a few thousand more than the Kickstarter people.
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It’s all about the Benjamins, baby.
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