Saved by Tekelala and
The Super-Aggregators and the Russians
Hal Varian, by the way, is the person who designed the Google ad auction. And it turned out he was only partially right about “information managers”. We call them influencers. But it was aggregators like Google that did the bulk of the heavy lifting. Computers can scale in ways that people can’t.
Gordon Brander • LLMs and information post-scarcity
The State of FANGEach of the FANG companies is in a similar position in their respective industries: they haven’t so much disrupted incumbents as they have subsumed them:Facebook: The late David Carr, who first broke the news about Facebook’s Instant Articles initiative back in 2014, worried that “media companies would essentially be serfs in a kin... See more
Stratechery • The FANG Playbook
Brands are forced to pay Facebook and Google to acquire customers.
Packy McCormick • Swaypay: Not Boring Investment Memo
Take this paragraph: it is just assumed that Google and Facebook ought to be paying publishers for their content, but any sort of rational evaluation would suggest that money should flow in the opposite direction. Google and Facebook direct traffic to publishers, and in Facebook’s case in particular, that traffic comes from the publishers themselve... See more