🤖 The ad duopoly ratchets prices and makes its numbers through the startup bust

Chamath tech w=0.90 · n=83 · E73 (2022-03-26) · explicit_prediction · strength 3 ▶ 36:35 SUPPORT

“most of these businesses that rely on Facebook and Google and Instagram for customer acquisition, those input costs are going up. And the reason you know that is that's $2 trillion of market cap that doesn't give a flying fuck what's happening in startup land. They're going to make their numbers. Right. ... Those are the most important companies in the world. They will ratchet up the prices. And so your input costs are going up. It's not just the physical supply of materials that I think is going up. It's just the cost of customer acquisition is going to probably go up by 20, 30, 40 percent.”

Chamath tech w=0.90 · n=83 · E86 (2022-07-08) · explicit_prediction · strength 2 ▶ 38:24 OPPOSE

“And when I called people on Wall Street, what they said was, because we think this is the company that has the most pressure on earnings. ... And so if you're going to go and question the earnings power of one of the 10 best companies in the world, you may want to consider the earnings power of every other company that's not Facebook.”

Jason tech w=1.05 · n=56 · E86 (2022-07-08) · explicit_prediction · strength 2 ▶ 37:58 OPPOSE

“Advertising is going to get hit, right? So one of the first things to go in a recession is advertising. If you're going to belt-tighten at a company, where can you do it? Well, you lay off employees, but you can't get out of your leases, as we talked about in real estate, but you can cut your spending on marketing. ... And so right now, it's looking pretty bleak for Facebook because of the headwinds they have. So the earnings could drop”

Friedberg tech w=1.08 · n=65 · E95 (2022-09-10) · sentiment · strength 2 ▶ 1:11:11 SUPPORT

“But I'm on the board of a couple of DTC companies and it is universally the conversation right now, because in the last year, the cost of DTC direct-to-consumer marketing on Facebook and Google was brutal, doubled, tripled, and a lot of the unit economics are falling apart on DTC businesses because of it, you know, costs a lot more to acquire the customer than you make from them.”

Friedberg tech w=1.08 · n=65 · E99 (2022-10-07) · explicit_prediction · strength 2 ▶ 1:10:26 OPPOSE

“And I think every day, look at how big TikTok has gotten. It is bigger than YouTube almost, or will be soon.”

Brad Gerstner (regular guest ×1.0) tech w=1.41 · n=17 · E101 (2022-10-22) · explicit_prediction · strength 3 ▶ 17:34 OPPOSE

“I mean, Apple is the apex predator of this entire market. We wouldn't be having this conversation but for the fact that Apple's changes with IDFA literally pickpocketed the industry $2 billion this year under the auspices of privacy. And so if you look at these companies usage up, pricing or ARPU down.”

Friedberg tech w=1.08 · n=65 · E113 (2023-01-27) · explicit_prediction · strength 2 ▶ 15:16 OPPOSE

“that change is now going to make this hit very, very hard beginning in 2024 So the ad networks themselves are already being massively hurt by Apple's ID changes, the third party cookies being removed. It's becoming harder to target consumers, harder to make money for publishers.”

Jason tech w=1.05 · n=56 · E113 (2023-01-27) · sentiment · strength 2 ▶ 20:23 OPPOSE

“There's two other things that they really should be looking at as these ad networks are losing their market share in the overall digital ad spend. There are two other players, Disney and Netflix doing these digital ads on their platforms and having ad tiers. And then you may have noticed Uber is doing an ad business now.”