Industry experts can warn investors about the status of your company for any number of reasons: You're not shipping enough units, your management system is destructive, your personnel decisions are very bad.
But "I fell asleep while using their billion-dollar product meant to entertain me" may just be the most humiliating out of all of them:
Amazon analyst Tom Forte was already concerned about the performance of the company's Lord of the Rings TV show "The Rings of Power." But after he watched several episodes, he became even more worried about the $1 billion project.
"We fell asleep during our first viewings of episodes one, three, and four and have not watched episode five yet due to a combination of not enjoying the first four episodes and a busy schedule," Forte, an analyst at D.A. Davidson, wrote in a recent note to investors. ...
Forte said that he was originally hopeful ahead of the show's launch, but has gotten more bearish as the weeks progress. As of September 28, according to Rotten Tomatoes, the show's average critic's score was an impressive 84% but its audience score was a lackluster 38%, the analyst wrote. Going into the launch, he expected the audience score to start low, as hardcore Tolkien fans were likely to be the first to watch it and likely to be most critical, then improve over time as more casual fans got involved. But that hasn't happened.
Yeah, even "hardcore Tolkien fans" are like:
And I mean, this guy seriously pulled no punches in his analysis:
"If we work off of Amazon's reported figures of 25 million viewers for the launch and an audience of 200 million Prime members who engage with Prime Video, we come up with the following: 12.5% penetration (or 87.5% lack of interest)," Forte wrote.
"If we marry the audience score, then we get the following: 9.5 million viewers liked it (38% of 25 million) suggesting 4.75% penetration (95.25% did not like it and or are not interested in it)," he added in the research note. "So as much as 95.25% of Prime members may not be happy about paying $20 more per year for Prime because of Amazon's content spending, including LOTR."
Amazon is surely begging this guy:
Sorry, Amazon, you did it to yourself!
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