danpascooch said:
Look at the threads under the shows, there are no clamoring "FIRST" that you see in a ZP, no 95% shared opinion that it was "good" you don't see barely any at all of "Keep up the good work!"
The people who post on the threads generally don't like it, and you have to understand that people who LIKE it are more likely to post than people who have stopped caring because they don't.
We definitely appreciate you airing your views and we are actually fair ruthless about cancelling shows that aren't doing as well as they need to.
But this is a case where what you think you know about how things work is totally wrong, and its leading you to false conclusions. We actually crunch the numbers on things like this very carefully.
In fact, users are more likely to post if they do NOT like a show than if they do like a show. A show that everyone likes gets very few comments relative to its size. For instance, our most popular show (ZP) has only around 3 comments per 25 video streams. Our least popular show has 25 comments per 100 video streams. The difference between them is an order of magnitude. And this correlation holds true for every show on the site. More comments per video stream means fewer video streams.
The reason for this, of course, is that on the internet, nobody has anything nice to say. People generally only post to tell you're wrong, like you did to us, and like I'm doing now. The vast majority of folks who liked the show enjoyed it and moved on without saying anything, just like I didn't say anything to all the people I agreed with.
If we used the comments to decide which shows to keep, we'd have killed every show. When we first launched MovieBob, everybody who posted said they hated him - go back and read how snide and mean the comments were. Now he has one of the most popular shows on the site. Go back and read about ZP when we first launched him. Tons of negativity about how we ruined The Escapist.
The actual metric of interest is thus not the number of negative comments, but the rate of change of comments versus traffic over time.
By those metrics, we see Axe growing.