If you’re anything like us you spent a good part of the week making your way through Netflix’s latest House of Cards. Rebecca Greenfield looked at the economics of the show:

• The show costs Netflix about $50 million a season to produce.
• Netflix intends to have five new shows of a similar scale every year.
• Yet most of its revenue comes from people paying $7.99 a month for a streaming subscription. It doesn’t use ads to top up that revenue.
• If Netflix wants to recoup the costs of producing the shows then the shows need to attract 2.6 million new individuals who subscribe for two years.
• Yet for Netflix this would be an increase of less than 10%. Last year Netflix increased its US membership by about 13%.

Read more about the dynamics of Netflix’s big bet over here.

Source: The Atlantic