For years I have said that my most criminally underrated video is my Cats experiment. In summary, I wanted to demonstrate opportunity cost by finding Star Wars fans on the opening day of Episode 9 and asking them how much it would take to pay them to see Cats instead. As a reminder, Cats has a 19% on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s a terrible movie.
I ended up finding someone willing to take a very large payment to switch movies. His wife filmed his reaction leaving the theater, and it’s gold. But after that day, I never heard from them again.
Until yesterday.
I got an email from Ethan (fan of the channel) with a link to Instagram. With no idea of what to expect, I was shocked by what I found.
He told his side of the story! Over 3.5 years later, the guy is still suffering from trauma.
That was money well spent.
What’s crazy is how many views his video has gotten. You can’t directly see views for Instagram Reels, but you can see likes. His video has 43k likes as of my writing. I found a website that videos that the likes-to-views ratio is about 5%, which is consistent with my stupid viral MrBeast short which got 500,000 likes on 6.8 million views. So from that, we can estimate that this Reel has gotten 600-900k views in its first two days. Easily should cross one million within the week.
How much did my video get? 5,800.
This is why I say the video is so underrated! Clearly the story has appeal. I guess I haven’t packaged it well enough to get people to watch. Oh well!
Links I enjoyed
Will global warming lead to more homeruns in baseball?
Warmer air is less dense, so balls fly a little farther in warmer weather. But the reason I liked this article so much was the way it stepped through seeing whether the effect on homeruns is plausible. We could do with more work that walk through back-of-the-envelope calculations, especially in economics.
How has inflation changed the dating scene? They report that dating is price inelastic, but I’m not sure if that’s true. Yes, 62% of respondents had not reduced the number of dates they go on, but 38% had. Hard to know what the total number of dates is by all of those people, but the modal number of dates for the sample is about 5. Let’s just say all 683 respondents go on 5 dates a year, meaning there is 3,415 dates a year. 38% of them reduce to 4 dates a year. Now there are 3,155 dates a year. That’s a 7.6% reduction in dates in response to a 7% increase in prices. That’s close to unit elastic!