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Paying Netflix $0.53/H, etc.
- mattmaroon 3y agoInteresting idea and I’ve thought about some of these before. Not sure a cruise is applicable since you’re also getting drinks and transportation. How much would it cost to watch Netflix while sippping whiskey and Ubering to Mexico? But many of these are pretty comparable.
- Oras 3y agoIs the average monthly usage of Netflix 43h/month? That's 1.1 hours per day! Where does this data come from? Is it global or specific to a country? It seems like quite a lot. Can't believe Spotify, which I assume people listen to during work or commute so would potentially be higher, has only 5 hours/month compared to 43h/month from Netflix. That's why I'm curious to know the source of the data.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoThe author does say: > Warning: many of the numbers below are probably incorrect! Email me if you’d like to help make something more rigorous. In any case, plugging in your own numbers would likely give you more interesting results.
- paganel 3y agoNot the OP and certainly not my case (cause I don't have a Netflix account) but I have lots of people I know who do more than 1.1 hours per day on Netlix. I'm talking mostly middle-class millenials from an Eastern-European capital city, but I'm pretty sure the same thing is in place in other locations, too. These people have effectively stopped watching television programming and it's all video-streaming for them now, mostly Netflix but also HBO Max and maybe Disney.
- giarc 3y agoYou can get your own specific stats for Netflix using a Chrome Extension (https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/netflix-viewing-stats/bckfpnenhimfckndcceonmkhheinmkob?pli=1 https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/netflix-viewing-sta...). I'm sure there are a few different ones, that was just the first google result.
- KomoD 3y agoDidn't work at all.
- reedf1 3y agoHours of TV watched a day are unintuitive to me, and by my opinion absurdly high. I discovered a few months ago, this graph: https://www.statista.com/statistics/269918/daily-tv-viewing-time-in-the-uk-by-age/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/269918/daily-tv-viewing-... Which completely shifted my understanding of TV consumption. Median daily UK linear TV viewing time was 3 hours in 2021.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ceejayoz 3y agoI suspect the stat gets blown out of proportion by people who leave the TV on as background noise. I'll never personally understand having a TV in the bedroom, but I know folks who can't fall asleep without it on.
- cj 3y agoThe GP said median, which should reduce the bias of the outliers.
- occamsrazorwit 3y agoIt's median, but I think there's a similar effect actually. A lot of people "watch TV" as a side activity to something else (like browsing their phone). Alas, I've never been able to multitask as well as my digitally-poisoned peers.
- iteratethis 3y agoNothing complicated about it. The UK has an aging population, and older people tend to watch TV a lot.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoI know retired people who sit and watch 10 hr a day of media.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- verzali 3y agoI'm surprised by the cost. Is it really $23/month in the United States? I paid €13.50 a month, which seems to be about $14.50 for the ad-free level. And even that is a big price increase on what it used to be, which is why I unsubscribed...
- Macha 3y agoThat seems eminently plausible to me. When I was growing up (and still the case for my parents, some of my childhood friends, etc.) at-home downtime meant TV time. This could easily be hours a day, especially on weekends.
- LeafItAlone 3y agoI work from home and have something on the TV all day, so these stats seem reasonable to me.
- andsoitis 3y ago> Is the average monthly usage of Netflix 43h/month? That's 1.1 hours per day! While the author doesn’t actually know how many hours subscribers spend, we do know that a subscription is used by several people in a household. If we take a conservative view of on average two people per subscription (e.g. you and your partner), a combined 1 hour per day seems very reasonable.
- SkyPuncher 3y agoWe typically watch a few hours of Tv each night. We’re all typcodojng something else, but we still have the TV on.
- sagaro 3y agoNetflix has a problem of multiple people sharing same account. So the number could be that of 2-3 people's watching time clubbed as one.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoI made an interactive version in Sheets; copy and enter your own values! https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LdHeoPY2rvwK3wj9tC_Gjyv1gptpRUREBPTRQ_y9w5I/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LdHeoPY2rvwK3wj9tC_G...
- fragmede 3y agohttps://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LdHeoPY2rvwK3wj9tC_Gjyv1gptpRUREBPTRQ_y9w5I/copy https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LdHeoPY2rvwK3wj9tC_G...
- elil17 3y agoReminds me of https://efficiencyiseverything.com/everything-per-dollar/ https://efficiencyiseverything.com/everything-per-dollar/
- deafpolygon 3y agoPretty inaccurate. "In 2020, each Netflix subscriber in the U.S. was watching an average of 3.2 hours of Netflix content per day." -- https://www.zippia.com/answers/how-many-hours-of-netflix-are-streamed-every-day/ https://www.zippia.com/answers/how-many-hours-of-netflix-are... Let's say there's 4 weeks to a month - that's 12.8 hours a month. So using $23/m is going to be 1.8/h -- I'd be curious to see the median hours per month per user -- I am willing to bet the average is skewed by the top 20% of viewers. A short game is still likely to be $60 - it is more dependent on the publisher setting price.
- vincentkriek 3y agoAccording to your source of 3.2h a day it would be closer to 90h a month (28 days * 3.2h) for the shortest month we have.
- flerchin 3y agoThere's 7 days in a week.
- dagw 3y agoIn 2020, each Netflix subscriber in the U.S. was watching an average of 3.2 hours of Netflix content per day A lot has changed in the streaming landscape since 2020. I would not at all be surprised if while the daily avg. hasn't changed, it is now spread out over more streaming services. I know I watch a lot more Not Netflix now than I did a few years ago.
- jefftk 3y ago2020 was also peak lockdown, which probably means more time watching anything relative to 2023
- ska 3y agoI think you skipped from days to weeks, so you missed a factor of 7…
- deafpolygon 3y agoYeah I can't read. :) sorry guys.
- flerchin 3y agoI'd seen 3.2h/day and $16.3/m from their earnings. Meaning $0.18/H.
- varispeed 3y agoI thought I won't be able to cancel Netflix. Whenever I made the decision to quit, they come up with a show that I would half watch and then think hmm maybe next one will be better, then come to a decision to cancel and well... rinse and repeat. Anyway, been 6 months clean now. I even forgot most of things I watched there.
- johncalvinyoung 3y agoExplains why Spotify and Kindle Unlimited is an automatic yes from me, and new fiction hard copies much less so, based on my usage. - Spotify: 65k minutes a year, 90h/mo, so around 0.13/h I’m a fast reader, so a novel averages 2-5 hours for me, probably 4h would be a fair guess. Last few years have averaged 150 titles a year on KU, so… 50hr/mo and 0.25/h in costs. And that print novel is usually 15-25 these days new… and still only 3-4h for me, at least $5/h. I’ll buy books I want to own in the long term, or support the authors, but that’s still expensive.
- renewiltord 3y agoIf you use Libby then it's tax dollars you've already paid that you're using. So marginal cost is $0/h.
- t3rabytes 3y agoMaybe I'm not trying to read books in the target market that my local library is trying to serve with what it has available on Libby, but I probably have a 5% success rate with books I'm trying to read actually being available on Libby. (Setting aside the very hostile payment structure that Libby imposes on libraries, which makes it look far less attractive as a tax-payer now that I know how it works)
- swozey 3y agoIf you don't know you can get a Brooklyn Public Library membership online not being a citizen of NY. They have one of if not the largest Libby/etc libraries. You'd get a card then put your # into Overdrive/Libby and check out books. https://www.bklynlibrary.org/use-the-library/borrow https://www.bklynlibrary.org/use-the-library/borrow edit: Well nevermind apparently they stopped doing it. I can't even renew my card.. boo. "As of July 15, 2022, Brooklyn Public Library is no longer offering its fee-based out-of-state library card. Our priority remains serving Brooklynites and assuring that they can access the materials they need in a timely manner. BPL Library cards remain free for anyone who lives, works, pays property taxes or attends school in New York State. Existing out-of-state accounts will remain active until their expiration date and will not be renewable." Does anyone know of another huge library with online/out-of-State cards?
- danpalmer 3y agoWhile the numbers might be a bit hit and miss, the comparison with individual creators is fascinating and definitely hits upon something that keeps me from subscribing to patreons/etc. I don't have just one creator who I would consistently want to support the most, there are probably 10-20 who I would like to support, however I'm not going to pay 10x of them $5/h for content when YouTube is 1x $0.50/h (and has their content). To me, content creation is always going to need to be bundled at some level because I want diversity that no one creator is ever going to provide, and when bundling the price typically reduces because the bundling correctly recognises that consumption does not scale up.
- josh-sematic 3y agoYou can support one for a few months, switch to another, etc.. Or just roll a dice and pick one of your favorites to support and leave it to others to support the others you like. Something is better than nothing if you want to keep independent creators around.
- danpalmer 3y agoYeah all of this is just a lot of work and decisions, and rolling a dice just feels weird and unfair. I do pay for YT premium which distributes money across my views which is therefore somewhat fair, and I'm considering a Nebula subscription (if Curiosity Stream's sign up flow doesn't persuade me not to again). I wish that Patreon had a support format where I could pay, say, $20 a month to Patreon and have that spread between whoever I'm supporting in a way that's cost efficient on payment fees and stuff like that. It doesn't help though that individual creators price very highly relative to the amount of their content I consume. Fundamentally, a podcast is just not worth $10 a month to me because if I lost access I'd just listen to a different one.
- josh-sematic 3y agoThe dice strategy is only unfair if you look at it from the perspective that you’re the only one doing things that way. But lots of people are likely doing something similar to that so that on average across enough people it works out. I would wager that most people who support at least one creator probably still consume media from far more creators than they can afford to support, so they just pick one or two somehow and call it a day. It’s basically the way I do it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- readthenotes1 3y agoIf the author is like me, I would not count the time I spend looking for something to watch on Netflix as watching Netflix. I am gobsmacked that he finds 43 hours a month of content, month in and month out. Full disclosure: former Netflix subscriber.
- raisedbyninjas 3y agoThey have a lot of children's content.
- buremba 3y agoI would love to pay for a service that connects all my subscriptions and finds out how much I pay for them hourly basis but it would be hard to make it work with the existing APIs I assume.
- hnbad 3y agoCan the mods please fix the title? "$x/h" is fairly common but the capitalization threw me off. With most units (especially in SI/metric but also others) capitalization can be the entire difference between two units, e.g. MW (megawatts) vs mW (milliwatts) or g (gram) vs G (gravity).
- _ea1k 3y agoYT is odd here. With that, you aren't paying for content but rather for the absence of unwanted content. How much are you paying per hour of unwanted ads?
- LeafItAlone 3y agoThey are all ad-free prices. Others have free and with-ad prices as well.
- _ea1k 3y agoYes, but most of them don't have full content available for free. With YT, by far the most compelling reason to pay is to get rid of ads.
- highwaylights 3y agoQuality of time spent is probably something fair to consider too. People pay $20 to go to the movie theatre for a couple of hours when they don't need to do that to watch a film. Some video games might take 200 hours, but they're probably slogging grindfests that have long since become a chore by the 50 hour mark.
- c2h5oh 3y agoVideo games take an average of 18h to beat now: https://howlongtobeat.com/stats https://howlongtobeat.com/stats and on average players will play less than half of that https://deathisawhale.com/2021/01/20/how-many-players-actually-finish-games/ https://deathisawhale.com/2021/01/20/how-many-players-actual... Excluding multiplayer games with huge replayability AAA titles cost closer to $8-10/h of entertainment. A LOT of AAA titles can be completed in about 10 hours and still cost $60
- skyyler 3y agoThe value proposition of AAA video games is actually just sad compared to indies. Stardew Valley comes to mind, but also infinitely re-playable games like The Binding of Isaac...
- AaronFriel 3y agoImportant to remember that the distributions here are multi-modal, so averages don't represent the data well. For AAA games I think you're way off. Looking at the 5 top played games in 2023, "main story" to "completionist": Title Main Story (hrs) Completionist (hrs) Baldur's Gate 3 57 146 Super Mario Wonder 10 19 Starfield 22 145 Zelda: ToTK 59 235 Hogwarts Legacy 27 68 Of these, the first two are co-op but not the same kind of multiplayer I think you allude to. Super Mario Wonder is not, I think, what many people would call "AAA". If we add Spider-Man 2, that's still a 17 hour main story, and has been criticized for being "too short". Many people who purchase AAA titles do expect 20-30 hours of entertainment, for a ~$2/hour return. And the Game of the Year is the title with the second best ROI!
- c2h5oh 3y agoDepends on the type of the games you are looking obviously: - 2023 shooters average just over 12h to complete - 2023 RPGs 37.5h - Battle Arena (all time) 433h All in all average for 2023 releases is just under 20h _to complete_, which doesn't necessarily mean people actually played that much - the other article I've linked suggests that on average people got to less than half of the main story..
- thinkerswell 3y agoThis is why platforms like https://www.loor.tv/ https://www.loor.tv/ are essential, which let you fund the tv shows you want to see, not just _all tv_ Netflix is producing.
- ZeWaka 3y agoholy shit the content on there is unhinged
- imkingginger 3y agoThat's a compliment for them.
- bluedays 3y agoIs it though? Because if they were doing something that good wouldn't I have heard of this service by now? I have a pretty good (I would wager better than most) understanding of which streaming services are available but I've never even heard of this one.
- imkingginger 3y agoThey just soft launched in June and are currently raising capital for marketing and customer growth. So it makes sense why you wouldn't hear from them.
- bluedays 3y agoAlso, after a quick Google search, it looks like it's religiously affiliated. They don't seem to make that apparent on their website though.
- imkingginger 3y agoI'm the founder! So I can answer any questions. Yes we're broad conservative and faith based. Going after what we call whiskey and cigar evangelical males.
- boplicity 3y agoThe easy mistake to make with this type of data is to assume that any creator (or business like Netflix) would have a functional business model if they were paid "hourly" or by piece of content. Such a model would ensure the enshitification of content by enforcing pressure to create predictably "successful" content. The alternative: Give real, predictable, support to creators and not content. Pay people to create. Give them the opportunity to fail and support them anyways. If they keep failing, sure, stop supporting them. But at least give them a few chances. This is why subscription models work: They provide stability and predictability. The problem with "microtransactions" is that it's all about commodification, which is the worst possible outcome for the creation of good art, reporting, and journalism.
- waltbosz 3y agoI'm interested to see a $/H breakdown of the cost of (self hosted htpc) piracy. You gotta buy hard drives and a media player, and spend time with set up and maintaince. You own time would be highly variable in cost. A parent of 4 vs a highschool kid have very different time values.
- gruez 3y ago> I'm interested to see a $/H breakdown of the cost of (self hosted htpc) piracy. You gotta buy hard drives and a media player, and spend time with set up and maintaince. Why would you need hard drives? If your internet is reasonably fast you can just delete the file and download it again next time you need to watch it. Same goes with htpc. A laptop with a hdmi cord works fine as well and is way cheaper.
- brewtide 3y agoI have Plex thrown onto a headless old franken i5 that's also doing duty as a home assistant instance, running an instance of car speed tracking openCV python thing and a goesrecv decoding instance (from the atom processor'd sdr connected laptop out back in the schoolhouse). You use the app on a phone to cast to a chromecast that's jabbered into the $84 projector, hooked to the "they are broken" Sony Bluetooth speakers and sub (not broken, now fixed!). And all currently mostly stored on an external 4tb USB 3 drive I've had for years. A rant, and a ramble, but nothing listed above is expensive or particularly hard to wing together. Is the experience mind blowing? Nope. But it works for the kids and I, and has certainly been worth the time (and nominal $) expenditure here. Zero. Qualms. Edit: $10 a month in electricity for this ancient machine doing all of these things, if you round up.
- vasco 3y agoIt takes a strong minded person to keep it to the numbers instead of jamming a 2k word blog post injecting their random commentary and bait title onto something that stands on its own. Major kudos.
- racl101 3y agoI definitely got a lot out of Premium YouTube. I must watch an average of 3 hours per day.
- merelysounds 3y agoThe “book” option as a single row seems incomplete. There are cheaper ebook versions, some can be accessed as a subscription - and sometimes for free in a library.
- mikpanko 3y agoCurious how much it costs Netflix to serve 1 hour of a movie in high res. Can anybody with relevant knowledge estimate?
- registeredcorn 3y agoFor audiobooks, do most people really buy books that are 10 hours or less? Most of mine are at least 11 hours. The average seems to be closer to 13 - 20 hours. Typically each of my books gets at least two listens, too.
- occamsrazorwit 3y agoI find it interesting to consider other forms of entertainment that aren't commonly thought of as such. Case in point, food is a form of "entertainment"; you need the basic nutrients, but those can be supplied very cheaply. If people consciously thought about how much a dinner costs per hour, it might lead more people to change their dietary habits. Another example would be makeup and fashion. It's a more subtle type of entertainment (more akin to "being on a cruise"), but the cost per hour is relatively low. That said, the benefit per hour is also low, and it's something missing from this sort of equalized comparison. One hour being at a theme park versus scrolling on Twitter versus watching a movie are very different values.
- sphars 3y ago> If people consciously thought about how much a dinner costs per hour, it might lead more people to change their dietary habits. This is how I think about my food when I want to eat out. Most meals are now $10+, give or take, and I start to think, "that's one month of YouTube Premium, is it really worth it to eat this?". A "subscription" of eating out often starts adding up real quick compared to my own cooking.
- opportune 3y agoI think that speaks more to the low price of YT premium than it does the high price of food. In general a lot of digital content (also most streaming services, and many video games) has amazingly good cost per time-entertained. And that food is still pretty cheap compared to a Broadway play or concert
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- occamsrazorwit 3y agoI'm not sure about that last part. A meal that lasts an hour is on the long side while a concert is several hours long. In my area (San Francisco) and experience, it's like $20 for a dinner or $50 for a concert. FWIW, I also operate on the experential-model, and I'm going to remember a concert far more than 3-4 random dinners.
- zehaeva 3y agoI enjoy comparisons like this, but there's one small bit of math that's off, >CGP Grey $7/mo 10m/mo $70/h There isn't 100 minutes in an hour.
- tripdout 3y agoSpotify average usage is 5 hours a month? No way, that's just 10 minutes / 3 songs a day. My yearly Spotify total was 57,000 minutes, which comes out to just over 2.5 hours a day - and that seems low when I think about it.
- sebastiansm 3y agoI mostly use spotify on weekends when driving to the supermarket. So I’m on the opposite side of use than you.
- littlecranky67 3y agoIMHO there is too much arbitrary averaging (or selective non-averaging) going on without details on the methodology. Is the avg. number of minutes watched/listened on youtube/spotify the average of paying subscribers? Plus, video games priced at 60$ are the release price, where is the average retail price for this? Do people that pay $60 on a video game tend to play the game longer, or rather shorter? Etc... To be fair, author acknowledges the numbers are probably incorrect, but there is too much going on without necessary details to do proper comparrison.
- amluto 3y agoAs an entertaining, mildly silly calculation: Netflix, at “best” settings, streams 1-7 GB/hour [0]. At the highest public tier for AWS EC2 egress, that’s 5-35 cents/hour, which would not be amazing for Netflix’s bottom line. CloudFront is a bit better at 2-14 cents/hr. Of course, Netflix surely doesn’t pay AWS retail prices, and Netflix doesn’t use AWS for streaming data anyway. But this does mean that any aspiring creator or startup that wants to try to collect its 50 cents/hr or so should either not deploy its streaming source in a big name cloud or should design it so it can be migrated off the big clouds quickly if the service takes off. (Cloudflare R2 appears to be quite good for this purpose. So is a small fleet of collocated machines. A single low-end modern server streaming out 10Gbps accounts for several hundred dollars per hour of revenue, and you need to be truly successful indeed before anything resembling AWS’s internal infrastructure is needed to keep the pipes fed. Keep in mind that Netflix blogs about how their servers pump out streams at 40x that rate.) [0] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/87 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/87
- dr_kiszonka 3y agoSmartphone use per hour seems to be $0.18 in the US using 2023 numbers, excluding all other costs (data plan, charging, etc.), on average. Average daily use time is 276 minutes or 4.6 hours [0]. Average smartphone price is $790 [1]. I am assuming people switch phones every 2.5 years. 790/(4.63652.5) = $0.18 0. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1045353/mobile-device-daily-usage-time-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1045353/mobile-device-da... 1. https://www.androidauthority.com/average-smartphone-cost-2023-3331896/ https://www.androidauthority.com/average-smartphone-cost-202...