DAVID NG – 5 May 2023 – Breitbart
Paramount’s streaming services — including Paramount+ and Pluto TV — continue to bleed money at an alarming rate, with the company reporting they lost a stunning $511 million in the first quarter of the year even as they added subscribers and viewers.
In the past six months alone, Paramount’s streaming services have lost more than $1 billion.
Paramount Global — formerly known as Viacom — saw its shares plummet Thursday following the bad earnings announcement, with the stock down more than 25 percent in afternoon trading.
Like other legacy Hollywood studios, Paramount is spending a fortune on its streaming businesses in the hopes of catching up to Netflix and capturing the growing number consumers who have cut the cord. While the company continues to add more subscribers, it is falling deeper in the red as it tries to keep up with viewers’ bottomless appetite for new content.
Paramount+ added 4.1 million subscribers during the first quarter, bringing its worldwide total to 60 million. By comparison, Netflix has more than 230 million paying subscribers. Pluto TV also saw its monthly average users rise to 80 million globally.
The weak advertising market is also hammering Paramount. The company reported its TV division saw ad revenue plummet 11 percent for the first quarter compared to the year-ago period. The ad market is suffering under the Biden administration as consumers cut back on spending as runaway inflation and fears of a recession continue to weigh on households.
As Breitbart News reported, the Walt Disney Co.’s woke streaming services are losing more than $1 billion a quarter at a time when CEO Bob Iger is trying to put the brakes on the company’s extravagant spending habits.
Lord Buckbeak: "Will you come into my parlor?," said the Spider to the Fly. 
What’s really sad is that a lot of the big corporations having a digital product (Netflix, Reddit, etc) were not the first into the digital club subscription or ad-based entertainment / media / community zone. These grew so rapidly by buying out (or coercing in) a lot of niche companies that were independently profitable in their original business model of buying non-exclusive licences to narrow categories of media or commanding a large share of a particular niche of web traffic. It ranged from things as basic as just text media (Stackexchange) to enterprises as large as what the original Youtube tried to be. Many also had dedicated bases of people who liked watching shows of just a couple types each, how-to-videos, or talking with people who shared a like-minded hobby, or being in some social media with a limited scope, where the user feels like a part of a club. On top of that, the site managers could go to advertizers and say, hey, we know what kind of people our users are, and so your advertizing money will be worth it if you decide that you want to market to this kind of people. In contrast, these major streamers and companies like reddit waste money on gaining market share by buying exclusive licences (much more expensive) and driving out the little man. Then, they want to try to patch up the revenue with ads which cannot really be targeted to well-defined subpopulations. Individually targeted ads have been shown to be a major loss, as have generic ads. It’s just been a repeat of corporate shrink in the digital world . Greed never ends well. Too big to not fail. Netflix, for example, has total assets equal to total liabilites plus total equity. Meaning, they have never really turned a profit, and have gotten in the way of smaller companies that could have done so. I don’t think anti-trust laws have been effective at all. That being said, if they just applied some traditional values (in content and business) and stopped trying to morally lecture everyone and eat the whole world, even today’s monopolies could probably turn a profit. Priorities.
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Hear, hear. Well said. Small companies, particularly in computer software and apps, can be purchased easily by MicroSoft or Apple, swallowed whole and then assimilated (like the ” resistance-is-futile” Borg of StarTrek fame) into existing platforms. Their owners become instant billionaires and they can retire comfortably at 25 or 30 years of age.
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