Netflix investor pointed out to Dillon that Blockbuster Online assigned sequential account numbers to each new subscriber, and those numbers appeared in the bar codes on its mailers. By having Netflix employees and their family members sign up for Blockbuster Online on a regular schedule—say, once a week—and noting down their customer numbers, Kirincich could calculate how effective its spending on marketing was, how quickly its base was growing, and how many movies the service had to ship. All of this data added up to the burn rate—how fast the online business was going through the budget
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