How To Make Taste Worth $100 Billion

On Netflix, A24, and fighting against slop

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“The technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re gonna die. In a meaningful way, you’re going to die.” David Foster Wallace

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Since I started my career in Silicon Valley, this quote from DFW has been like a quiet buzz in the back of my mind. Occasionally, the noise would get louder and grating, like when I met VPs at Meta who didn’t let their kids have social media. Bzzz. Or when I downloaded TikTok for the first time and watched for 6 1/2 hours straight. BZZZ.

All around me, evidence accumulated that the product of the internet was not the uplift of humanity that I was promised, but instead it was a brain-liquefying, outrage-inducing, dummification machine, “given to us by people who do not love us but want our money.” For a select portion of the globe, the internet is a wonderful tool that enriches their lives. However, the reality is that the vast majority of humanity’s time is spent on meaningless content.

I call this THE SLOPPENING.

The sloppening is the economically rational choice by tech companies to dish up steaming buffets of mid. The quality of this content is not determined by its long-term consequences, its artistic merits, or on the elevation of the human spirit; instead, it is determined by whether it is engaging for users. It is selected by an algorithm, and increasingly, created by an AI algorithm, for the sole purpose of keeping our eyeballs unblinking and consuming. And, I won’t lie, it feels so good to watch. However, as these types of content become “the main staple of our diet, [we’re all] gonna die.”

You don’t need me to tell you this. You can feel it right? There is just something off in the way the world consumes media. Short-form video, ragebait, binging forgettable shows, this isn’t what we are meant to be.

But what The Leverage is interested in as a publication is solutions. How do you stop The Sloppening? Theoretically there could be regulation, or a moral awakening that makes this stuff no longer desirable. I’ll leave those paths to the priests and politicians (good luck). And on an individual level, you can reject easy media in pursuit of productive, challenging work, but most people don’t have the will-power for that.

The world needs a systematic fix. We need to fight fire with fire. The only way to push against this tidal wave of algorithmically-injected stupidity is with a company that is just as scalable and profitable as attention aggregators like Netflix, YouTube, or TikTok. We need to fight the negative externalities of frictionless consumption with the positive externalities of deliberate friction.

For the last year, I’ve spoken with over dozens of media investors, technology operators, and creatives on this topic. My goal has been to discover a new framework and company archetype, one that allows startups to steal market share from attention aggregators while simultaneously elevating the human spirit.

I am pleased to report that after months of whiteboarding and thinking, I have cracked it. I call these companies “taste elevators.” These are corporations that can have $100 billion outcomes, and as a side-benefit, save the human soul.

Why has slop won so far?

There are three pieces of economic logic that have dictated the internet into its current shape:

1. Humans are crazy, crazy cheap. The “zero-price effect” shows people don’t treat free as a categorically different price. In controlled experiments, dropping a price from one cent to zero more than doubled demand (from ~29% to ~64%) even when the relative price gap stayed constant, revealing how “free” warps choice.

   By mid-2025, ad tiers were already ~46% of subscriptions across major streamers, and Netflix said its ad plan was driving ~55% of new sign-ups in markets where it’s available. Even the most dominant video platform today of YouTube only has ~6% of its subscribers on premium (which is part of the reason it is so dominant). We love cheap and we especially love things that are “free.” Humanity has a remarkable ability to ignore time costs.

2. Our attention is algorithmically steerable. In a 2013 Wired interview with some Netflix engineers, they bragged that “75 percent of viewer activity is driven by recommendation.” When you pair it with a 2019 Hacker News comment from a Netflix engineer, where he explained how they had A/B tested outplay times and found that around 10 seconds maximized viewing time, it speaks to how much we follow, like lemmings who binge Breaking Bad, the suggestions of a platform.

3. We have lizard-brains that love drama. There’s strong empirical support that “high-arousal” and moral-emotional content spreads more effectively than reflective content. My favorite study on a large Twitter dataset found moral-emotional language increases virality by roughly 20% per additional moral-emotional word. Similar papers from 2023 and 2024 came to near-identical conclusions. Every creator on the internet is incentivized to be emotionally bombastic, not just by monetization schemes, but by human nature itself.

By pairing these quirks of human psychology with the subsidization provided by ads, you get the sloppening. If slop is winning because of incentives and human psychology, then the obvious response is to build platforms that do the opposite: curate carefully, charge money, and refuse to compromise. We’ve done that. It hasn’t scaled and it hasn’t changed anything.

Why the current “tasteful” companies haven’t scaled

The reason the premium “taste” platforms stay niche isn’t that they’re incompetent or that audiences secretly hate good art. It’s structural. They’re fighting the sloppening at the catalog layer, while the sloppening is being won at the distribution + training layers. For the rest of this piece, I’m going to talk about film, because it has the most case studies and is one of our most commercial art forms, but taste ladders are applicable to every entertainment format.

In film, there are two types of companies that would broadly be considered tasteful.

• Streamers: These companies offer subscription services where consumers can consume a narrow catalog of high-quality content. The venture-back darling is MUBI which just raised a $100M growth round led by Sequoia Capital, valuing it at ~$1B. The other primary company is Criterion (my personal favorite) which doesn’t have any venture backing. For both of these, they compete on the basis of curation. Criterion of legacy films and MUBI with legacy films plus films they produce themselves. However, the average MUBI subscriber uses an average of six other streaming services. Premium taste streamers are mostly used as a garnish versus the main staples of a content diet. Consumers will watch indie films occasionally, but they’re still going to watch every season of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.

• Production: The other monetization path is being the producer of higher-taste projects, exemplified by studios like A24 and NEON. A24 has raised $300 million, with $75 million in June of 2024 from Thrive, at a current valuation of $3.5 billion. These companies compete by creating, funding, or purchasing movies and then running marketing campaigns to convince consumers to watch these films.

All of these companies compete by selecting content, and providing some kind of context that makes that content more legible. For legacy films, they’ll provide educational materials and critical analysis. For new films, they throw around the weight of their brand to run award shows campaigns.

Both streamers and studios are selection engines—raising additional capital and aiming for larger valuations means using investor’s funds to either make more movies that appeal to the indie-film audience, or making movies that have a broader appeal (e.g. increasing share of wallet versus increasing wallet volume). The problem is that in both cases they are monetizing pre-existing taste.

If they are attempting to make cinema with Indie sensibilities, they assume the user already has patience for slow pacing or ambiguity, and has enough context to not bounce. That’s a narrow segment. And crucially: it’s the same segment every time. Premium platforms do not, by default, create a compounding pipeline of newly discerning viewers. They serve the people who already have the muscles and offer memberships to retain them. It’s why A24 has gone from Indie Darling to making films with the biggest movie stars in the world this year with Dwayne Johnson in The Smashing Machine and Timothee Chalamet in Marty Supreme.

Essentially, these companies will struggle to scale because they are limited by market size. To grow, they have to compromise their artistic integrity with lower-brow films. All of which brings me back to my proposed fix—a taste ladder. A taste ladder’s explicit goal is about increasing market size, not stealing market share.

How a taste elevator is structurally different

I am interested in taste less as a status symbol held by dudes with patchy mustaches in Brooklyn and more as discernment under abundance. It is the ability for people to make conscious decisions about what is good. This requires an understanding of what qualities the artist is attempting to impart, and the ability to then judge that attempt according to your preferences. The fundamental problem with firms in the sloppening is that they use algorithms to do your discernment for you.

A taste elevator fixes that.

Taste elevators are companies 1) structurally impart increased discernment to its customers and 2) monetizes that newly formed taste through subscriptions and high price SKUs. It is not “Criterion, but bigger.” That’s the wrong mental model. A taste elevator treats taste like a capability—something you can build—so the product is designed around progression:

• Starts where the masses are: it needs an on-ramp compatible with reality (bundles, institutional distribution, freemium, or an ad-supported entry tier).

• Optimizes for upgrading, not just watching: recommendations aren’t “what will you click fastest?” but “what’s the next rung you can handle?”

• Has enough friction to teach but not churn passive consumption into perception-training, without turning the experience into homework.

• Creates compounding demand: as users become more capable, they can enjoy richer work, which expands what the platform can successfully distribute—so the TAM grows with the product.

Premium platforms win by serving a cultivated audience. Taste elevators win by cultivating an audience. That’s the entire bet.

For paid subscribers, let’s get into how you’d actually build one: the four mechanics that make elevation work (including a Spotify study that upends conventional retention wisdom), the monetization math showing why a taste elevator can out-earn Netflix on a per-user basis, and which company—Letterboxd, Criterion, A24, or someone new—is best positioned to pull it off.