The genius of Moviepass (and Steemit)

Hey guys,

Today I wanted to talk about the movie subscription service called Moviepass that allows its customers to see as many movies as they want in a month in turn for a monthly subscription fee. A small startup with only 12,000 monthly subscribers last January, Moviepass has exploded on the scene with over a million monthly subscribers this year. The main reason they’ve been able to attract such a large amount of people in just over a year was that they lowered their monthly subscription price from $45 a month to just $9.95. Now off the bat it seems as if Moviepass is just asking for bankruptcy. If a normal movie ticket costs ~$10-12, how are they going to be able to make money if the customers decide to go to the movies even once a month???

With a bit of digging, I found out why (or why I think why). A data analytics company named Helios and Mathiason analytics owns a large portion of Moviepass. It all made perfect sense now. Moviepass is able to keep it’s prices low because it’s funded by this giant data analytics company, who then in turn takes the data collected from the app by movie goers and sells it to movie studios/theaters. After all, knowledge is worth more than money, no arguing that. This fascinating to me since Moviepass has basically violated every microeconomic law that exists, including the most basic one: selling a product for more than it cost to obtain. Yet they still profit, and they still expand, and I think with the right management and vision, they can become a dominant corporation in a niche they created themselves, much like Netflix did years ago online.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that in order to not only survive, but thrive in the financial environment today, a business must be able to innovate in some way like Moviepass has. A business must be able to bend economic rules and theories in a way that benefits them.

I also realized that in a way, Steemit has done the same. By rewarding users for posting good content directly based on upvotes and comments, it revolutionizes blogging as we know it. In my opinion, this platform could become one of the biggest blogging sites out there. After all, innovation is key, and steemit is doing an excellent job at it.