Member-only story
Don’t Count Quibi Out
How the new streaming subscription service can survive a disappointing launch
When Quibi finally launched a few weeks ago, I wrote a piece about the finer details of the platform that skeptics seemed to ignore altogether. The catalyst for writing that piece was a frustration that journalists, venture capitalists, and many others seemed to be dismissing Quibi both offhandedly and with a seemingly personal joy in what they knew would be the company’s eventual failure.
Six weeks after launch, Quibi has a reported 3.5 million downloads and 1.3 million active users. But it quickly fell in rankings in the app store, none of the launch content has reached the cultural zeitgeist, and in a feisty interview with the New York Times last week, founder Jeffrey Katzenberg complained that the number of users did not meet expectations, saying, “It’s not up to what we wanted. It’s not close to what we wanted.” So, were the skeptics right? Is Quibi dead on arrival?
The criticism that I saw before Quibi’s launch seemed to me to come down to two factors: First, as Eric Lu, the co-founder of Kapwing, tweeted recently, it’s easy to criticize new things. Most new things fail, and you’ll never be ridiculed for thinking that something new won’t succeed.
Second, much of the criticism is coming from Silicon Valley tech types, who viewed raising $1.75 billion before launching a product and getting customer feedback as asinine. For technology companies, it most likely is! (See: Magic Leap.) However, as Nathan Baschez and Adam Keesling explain in a recent piece with the headline “Quibi Will Be a Multi-Billion Dollar Company,” “Quibi isn’t a tech startup. It’s a media business. And that turns out to be an important distinction.”
You can see the difference in public opinions on Quibi’s capital raise based on whether the individual is in the tech industry or someone with expertise in the media industry:
