The Emmys: A Quick Calculation Reveals a Data Lead May Not Result in Better Content

Netflix has:

1. The largest subscriber count

2. The biggest content budget

3. The most data

Yet, HBO is almost 3x more efficient at producing high quality content that produces Emmy nominations. While the relationship is less severe, it holds up, even after removing Game of Thrones.

In 2017 and 2018, a variety of industries have shown slowing progress in using data to manipulate human behavior. In 2019, I believe it's likely that the narrative begins to shift. That after years of steady progress, we find that there are limits to data's predictive power - even while some of the promises that were made about what we could do with data finally come to fruition.

Either that, or Netflix just isn’t that good at using its data yet….