last highlighted date: 2024-12-07
Highlights
- The hottest product in tech is Bluesky, adding 1 million users a day since the election. CEO Jay Graber says the platform will never have ads, as ads are the road to “enshittification.” OK then. Ad-supported media, as a whole, is one of the least volatile businesses over the last century — accounting for 1.5% of GDP, and rarely straying from that number.
- Amazon registers 37% of e-commerce in the U.S., while its nine closest competitors (Walmart, Apple, Target, etc.) account for 23% combined. Nearly two-thirds of the world’s social media ads are sequestered to Meta. Since 2014, 90+% of internet searches are done on Google; the second-most-popular search engine, Microsoft’s Bing, commands less than 4% of the global search market.
- In my industry, podcasting, the concentration is extreme even by digital standards. Of the 600k podcasts that produce content each week, the top 10 capture half the revenue. Put another way, to build a business in podcasting that pays people well and retains talent with high opportunity cost(s), you likely need to be in the top 0.1% by listenership. As a member of UCLA’s crew team, I was 3.5x more likely to be an Olympian than a successful podcast host.
