Netflix is Losing Money On Those Dave Chappelle Specials

Today was the Netflix walk-out by employees upset over the streaming network’s Dave Chappelle special The Closer. Netflix also fired a Black trans employee for leaking company information. We think we’ve discovered what that leaked company information is, and it’s kind of an ironic footnote to this whole Chappelle controversy. According to Bloomberg, Netflix has lost money on the last two Dave Chappelle specials.

“While reporting on the growing unrest at Netflix over Dave Chappelle’s new special The Closer, we obtained internal Netflix data that offered the clearest picture yet of how the service measures the success of its projects,” Bloomberg reports. “Chappelle’s specials are the most-watched on the service, but they are also the most expensive. About 24 million people watched a previous special, Sticks & Stones, which cost the service $23.6 million, according to the documents. (The Closer cost $24.1 million.)”

Wait, how in the fuck does an hour-long comedy special cost $24 million to produce? We digress, but back to the point.

Since it doesn’t have advertising, Netflix uses a complex score to rate its shows’ profitability. They say Chappelle’s “specials score less well when you look at efficiency score, which measures a show’s value over its cost. The special had an impact value of $19.4 million and an efficiency score of 0.8X. An efficiency score of 1x means that a show generated about as much viewership as it cost. Anything above 1x means a show was efficient. Anything below that means it was not.”

“Chappelle’s special scored less than 1x, while Bo Burnham’s Inside scored a 2.8x. Based on these measurements, Netflix got better results from Burnham than from Chappelle.”

So it’s not like Netflic lost a ton of money on the last two Chappelle specials, but they didn’t break even. And they did nowhere near as well as Squid Game, which Bloomberg reports made 47 times more revenue than the cost of production.