Interesting article and subject. Personally, I don't agree with Fukunaga on the algorithms eventually winning out because as extensive as all of this data collected is, there's still a lot out there about human behavior and consumer tastes left undiscovered and un-understood if it's understandable at all (and I don't think it is beyond a certain point).
One could point to publishing's long history, or the history of fiction itself and extrapolate and interpret the data borne of any given story's popularity or even the actual words story consumers have uttered through the ages in awe or disdain of said stories and still one could come away with little in the way of useful information on what's going to be a hit and what isn't. We have centuries worth of that data that's been picked over and re-hashed again and again and still we know only the surface-level aspects of what makes a certain kind of story resonate or what makes 'x' a bestseller. Heck, Hollywood's entire raison d'etre lies in trying to tease out what's going to bring the greatest ROI - get the most bottoms in the most seats at the most multiplexes - and they often wind up frustrated and wrong to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars thrown away.
I think a lot of the 'formula' stuff, algorithm-extrapolation included, is put forward by those looking to make money off of hopeful storytellers who are looking for that 'easy' button - the shortcut telling them what audiences want which will more quickly vault them atop the bestsellers lists. Meanwhile, the formula peddlers are silently earning multiples of what their eager followers are earning from their fiction. For many writers, there seems to be a better return in selling the promise of being able to calculate and construct what's going to hit big rather than in trying to hit big with their own fiction themselves. If Amazon proves unwise, they could wind up staring into their pool of data long enough that they'll eventually fall into it and drown. Netflix too, for that matter.
I suppose what I'm saying is, the whole thing is squishy, for lack of a better term. People are strange and unpredictable. Tastes vary and can turn on a dime. I've been reading books that I've loved and found fantastically gripping and yet I've put them down and walked away in the middle of particularly engrossing passages. Why? Who knows? Maybe my cold made me drowsy. Maybe a friend arrived. Maybe something distracted me. Maybe something bothered me from 50 pages before and wore at the back of my brain until I felt compelled to stop and think on it. Maybe I smelled and needed a shower right then and there. Maybe my oven was finished preheating. That's just it. There's a million and one reasons why people do this while not doing that. Why they put a book down or pause an audiobook or speed it up or do pretty much anything. Of course, my examples are purely anecdotal, but I doubt they're all that unique. I'm sure I'm not the first to stop consuming something they were enjoying and then forget to go back to it, or they go back to it for any given reason at any given time.
Point is, no one knows why consumers do what they do beyond superficial theorizing. No one knows what's going to hit and what isn't. What's going to grab someone and retain them for 'x' amount of time or for 'x' amount of product. No one can tell what's going to resonate and what's going to fall flat. Entire industries are built on "knowing", but in my opinion it's more like the broken clock analogy. So, Amazon and Netflix can continue compiling data until the cows come home, it won't matter. You won't be able to look at any of it and just conjure a hit from it out of the ether. Sure, you can try, but to me it's a fool's errand. You could put all of the perfect elements together in a tightly constructed piece and it could still fail. Really, you're likely far better off focusing on visibility for your work than you are focusing on building the perfect mousetrap.
Okay, so maybe you can point to certain trends or cliches that are common denominators in those stories that turn out to be hits, and maybe you can string some of those together and wind up with what one might consider a more 'commercially viable' product than something that doesn't contain many/all of those trends or cliches...but, for every one writer who manages to succeed by doing so, there's five others who've followed the same path and wound up nowhere. Why? Because again, the whole thing is squishy, foggy, unknowable, i.e. human. We're all making guesses and more often than not we wind up wrong.
No one in Hollywood sets out to make a dud, and I imagine the same is true in publishing. Everyone, if they had their way, would create something that truly resonates with people and make all the money, but knowing what's required to do that ahead of time is fuzzy at best. All you can really do is put your heart and soul into your creation, work and spend to make it as visible as possible, and then hope it takes off. That's kinda scary and uninspiring, and there's not really any money in selling that message to all the bestseller-wannabes out there, but I think it's the truth.
And really, everything put forward as being a means to 'crack the code' or discern the 'formula' or 'unleash the power of the algorithms' is actually just thinly veiled coping mechanisms for the many who don't want to deal with the intimidating un-calculable squishiness of consumer tastes, or maybe it's a message forwarded by those who don't want to come to grips with the fact that they're eventually going to have to spend on advertising if they're to have a snowball's chance...OR, it's the recognition by some of the more cynical (or savvy?) among us that there's more money to be made in selling the idea of predictability than there is in actually trying to write the next big bestseller. Kind of like how some geniuses out there realized there's more to be made in selling the ball bearings than there is selling the tanks.
