The New Gatekeepers 🗒 https://www.ben-evans.com/presentations TLDR: 💸 The end of free money (for Americans) - E-commerce back to its long-term trend (after COVID), same as COVID "backed" products - First time in history, ad revenue slips for Google and Facebook - VC financing back to trend line - 250k tech layoffs, last 12m - 5bn people with a smartphone 📉 Decline of old gatekeepers - Major decline of department stores and newspaper ads (5-10x last 20 years) - Amazon surpassed Walmart - Ads as a % of GDP - stable, but now 50%+ is Internet - Top10 media owners dominated by tech companies, Comcast and Disney are "small" - Top 100 global advertisers ~ GAFA ad revenue - The more imperialist the country - the more % of GDP as ad spend, US have 2x retail space per capita than other imperialist countries - Amazon ads > Amazon Prime, Amazon ads > global newspaper ads - Amazon - 7.5% of retail revenue is ads - Fast fashion overtakes traditional retail - Streaming titles overtake cable and broadcast, fragmentation grows, tv unbundles - Streaming entrants match legacy players' production budgets, YouTube creators payments ~ 1 major content player - Everything is about bundling and unbundling 🤷‍♂️Speculations about the future - Implosion of next big thing (DeFi, NFT, several AI winters) - US enterprise moving to cloud - All of them are looking to monopolize the next paradigm, so far without results - Meta spends US$14bn on metaverse in the last 12 months (25% of USA spend on war) - Generative "AI" circle jerk