Imaginative Indices and Deceptive Domains: How Netflix’s ...
Imaginative Indices and Deceptive Domains: How Netflix's Categories and Genres Re-Define the "Long Tail"
By Daniel Smith-Rowsey
INTRODUCTION
In Chris Anderson's 2006 book The Long Tail: The Future of Business is Selling Less of More, the editor-in-chief of Wired explained that compared with previous business models, the "granular data mining" employed by Internet companies caters to customers' tastes far more precisely, enabling niche offerings as easily as mass-market products.1 However, as Astra Taylor and others have since written, in practice, the Long Tail strategy in fact suppresses creative freedom and user choices, directing users less to their self-curated gardens and more to advertisements that support oligarchic Internet companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Netflix.2
In 2006, Anderson supported his arguments with interviews with Reed Hastings, Chief Executive Officer of Netflix, which has since emerged as the definitive media company of the 21st century, perhaps best exemplifying the synergy and tension between Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Netflix is one of the leading providers of digitally delivered media content and is continually expanding access across platforms, mobile devices, and worldwide subscribers, who now number nearly 50 million. Once the poster child for the Long Tail strategy, now Netflix's own homepage and envelope advertisements ? marketing big hits ? offer evidence of how the strategy has been warped by corporate interests, with troubling implications for other leading Internet media companies like the ones mentioned above, as well as the ones more closely affiliated with the "Big Six" media companies (Warners/HBO, Universal/Comcast, Viacom, Disney, Sony,
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Fox). To provide a more thorough example of this problem, the following case study sheds light on one of Netflix's three home-page grey-text search-field suggestions ? not "Titles, People," but the third, "Genres."
Rick Altman writes that platforms of distribution and exhibition exert a deterministic power over how audiences perceive genres.3 Netflix features a "Complete Genre Listing" of 19 umbrella categories, roughly 400 sub-categories, and about 72,000 so-called "micro-genres" (e.g. "Visually Striking Father-Son Movies"). Netflix asserts a sort of capitalist-driven postmodernism, in that studios can, to a limited extent, pay to have films/shows pop up where they should not be. Netflix refuses to let users understand this process at the same time as it diminishes certain well-researched indices. Clearly, then, Netflix privileges some films and shows and types of viewership, and to some degree re-constitutes what Netflix's 50 million users think when they think of film and TV.
Altman establishes a binary of two different strains of genre criticism. For Altman, ritual critics see films offering imaginative solutions to real-world problems, but ideological/Marxist critics see films offering deceptive non-solutions that serve governmental/corporate purposes. Altman sometimes says that films do both at once, and Netflix's 19 umbrella categories and 400 subcategories provide further evidence to this effect, suggesting and encouraging leaps of imagination as well as extensions of deception. Here it is also important to point out genres that are effaced or diminished by Netflix, a development that threatens these genres' very existence in an increasingly Netflixed world. If the curator at the Museum of Modern Art exercises considerable discretion over what counts as Modern Art, we may say that Netflix curators tell us what counts as types of movies, and even movies themselves.
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A surfeit of genre criticism presumes two major groups who label genres ? studios and audiences. The powers of video stores and other distributors are sometimes acknowledged, but rarely as a third, determinative labeling agent. Steve Neale,4 Yvonne Tasker5 and other scholars chart an ontological course between studios and audiences, reminding us of the shifting capitalist imperatives of the former and the shifting "usability" imperatives of the latter. Yet Netflix, a lowly distributor, presents a rather rigorous, seemingly exhaustive index of genres without quite adhering to either of these groups. Clearly Netflix shares the capitalist imperatives of the studios, but they do not see eye to eye, not least because Netflix does not wish to lose market share to, for example, foreign distributors or websites ? including YouTube, Hulu, Vimeo, and Vine ? who offer monetizable content that the studios neither approve of nor distribute. Though Netflix markets itself as a customer-oriented experience, it is hardly as user-curated as, say, instagram, imgur, reddit, or pinterest. Considering the wide, increasing reach of Netflix, future genre criticism would do well to consider this third source of genre definition.
THE 19 AND THE 400
To understand this case study of how Netflix turned the vaunted Long Tail into something less inclusive, begin with Netflix's list of 19 umbrella genres/categories. It is: Action and Adventure, Anime and Animation, Children and Family, Classics, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Faith and Spirituality, Foreign, Gay and Lesbian, Horror, Independent, Music and Musicals, Romance, SciFi and Fantasy, Special Interest, Sports and Fitness, Television, and Thrillers. Yes, some of these appear under more than one header: for example, the hyperlink for Classic Dramas can be found under Classics or under Dramas, and the link takes you to the same list. After eliminating doubles like these, and accounting for some built-in Netflix instability which I will discuss later, I have arrived at the rough number of 400 sub-categories.
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