Netflix Stands at Top Of Stand-Up Comedy
LOS ANGELES—To its competi-tors, the Netflix take over of comedy must have seemed nasty, brutish andquick. Inonly a few years,the streaming giant has pushed aside HBO as the homeof prestigestand-upand made Comedy Central seem like Comedy marginal By signing up top celeb-rities (Dave Chappelle, Jerry Sein-feld, Chris Rock), turning rising talent intostars Wong and Han-nah Gadsby) and expanding the volume of new content, Netflix has transformed the stand-up special into the center of popular culture. Howdid it do it? The cynical explanation is that the service just outspent every-one else. But in interviews, Lisa Nishimura, Netflix's vice presi-dent of original documentary and comedy programming, and Robbie Praw, its director of original stand-up comedy, tell a different story,one in which iconoclasm, new metrics and abiding faith in the algorithm disrupt the stale conventions of an industry. Last month, Ms. Nishimura ex-plained perhaps her greatest coup, persuading hl r.Chappelleto return to a national platform. She met him by chance in London one year and invited him to a party after the Bafta Awards. Years later, Mr. Chappelle agreed toreleasehisfirst standupspecialin 13 years on Netflix, and three more in 2017. His pay for the package of shows was reported as S60 million. Nedlix does not confirm salaries, but, asked how she determined what toofferhim, Ms. Nishimura respond-ed: "Thewaywedomerything else; shesaid. "We gointothedata." The same impulse was evident over a decade earlier when Ms. Nishimura started working for Netflix, buying content from com-panies other than major studios.Af-ter seeing how specials first shown on cable performed on Netflix, she developed a hunchthat the common wisdom about the stand-up special — that it had a limited audience —was wrong. It was a fairly niche genre then; months went by without a major re-lease. But when you made specials readily available, Ms. Nishimura noticed there was an enthusiastic untapped market. When Netflix started developing original content, Ms. Nishimura made the case to bet big on comedy. Now, 50 percent of its 130 million subscribershave watched a special in the last year, and a third of those viewers have watched three such shows. Netflix releases about a special a week, and the frequency increased in fall 2016, not long after Ms. Nishimura brought on Mr. Praw, who was vice president at the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal. Their strategy isroaed in thebelief that Netflix doesn't need to choose between qualityandquantit•. They can doboth,their argument goes, because they have data on what the audience wants. Unlike traditional media outlets, Netflix does not fixate on age or gender. "You would be in danger of imparting biasesof what a75-year-old Japanese grandmother would want to watch versus a 14-year-old kidfromOhio,' Ms. Nishimura said. "But there are moments in time when they are in the exact same taste cluster." The Netflix system has more than 2,000 "taste clusters" that measure content by tone, timbre and feel-ing to predict what you will want to see when you log onto the site. Netflix places more emphasis on whether a show isuplifting,somber or redemptive than on genre or who the director is. When asked if he isworried about running out of stars, Mr. Praw pointed to forthcoming specials by Ellen DeGeneres and Adam San-dier. Asked if Netflix can continue to offer huge sums, Ms. Nishimura replied, "If we continue to grow the audience,vre're This may be partly why Netflix is putting a premium on the global market, recently hiring an Amster-dam-based executive to recruit in-ternational comics. Next year, the service will release 47 half-hour specials in seven different languag-es. When you look around the world, there's stand-up markets all over the place where there weren't 20 years ago: Mr. Praw said. "Now there's clubs in Korea."