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Category: Commentary

Commentary; our thought leadership, newsletter notes and long form pieces.

Commentary

LLM referrals

Edition #484 A rapid uptick in new users from LLMs, brand safety AI agents and Substack goes brand. We all saw it coming, the growth of LLMs as an acquisition source, but interesting to see two businesses in the past week note their growth directly from them. Mercury bank, and Vercel app platform both experienced approximately a threefold increase in their signups, driven from the LLMs. Notably ChatGPT as the biggest source. Mercury noting exponential rise of signups from AI… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
March 13, 2025
Commentary

Search wars

Edition #483 Who is winning the AI search wars, newsletter hustlers and AI spending your ad dollars. I wrote on this a while ago, but the thesis was that ChatGPT etc had a huge risk of being undermined by Google itself, because it has the muscle memory and ability to roll out AI products to billions. And this story from BI seems to confirm that, Google said Monday that it now sees more than 5 trillion searches… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
March 6, 2025
Commentary

Cross platform

Edition #482 Cold plunges, bug bounties & cross platform measurement. Over New Years, I had the pleasure to stop in Oslo, is it even a city right? The harbour was all frozen over, and dotted around the harbour are these floating havens of warmth. Wood fired saunas. Naturally I had to. After securing a spot, my wife and some friends went along. A two hour slot, gets you a spot in the sauna, stoke it as you wish, and… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
February 27, 2025
Commentary

Metrics models

Edition #481 Which will win, metrics vs models. Bluesky monetization and that Adalytics report. This is neat, Graze is helping Bluesky monetize their feeds but also build your own social network in a way. Simple, good execution, I should try out the ad product. Late last week we also had the latest Adalytics report drop, leading to a raft of Friday night messages, from synopsis, cause, who was impacted etc. Not cool to see. Neither were some of… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
February 13, 2025
Commentary

New take

Edition #480 On the benefits of our new week, new take culture, Gemini Ads & do we have a Google cookie resolution. New week, new take. The common joke is how the public conversation quickly swaps from one topic to another, meaning the experts now need to recalibrate on a new topic. We’re all guilty of this. i.e. Deepseek to tariffs. It’s an interesting cultural phenomena, whereby everyone has an audience, so wants to be able to speak… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
February 6, 2025
Commentary

Scotch

Edition #479 Internet brain, Meridian is now available and let’s enjoy a glass of scotch with Harrison Ford. Internet brain seems to be a topic bubbling up, I caught this piece via Ben Dietz note, could creativity by the antidote to internet brain? And gives some ideas on giving us all a bit of a reset. It’s a good reminder, do make sure you give yourself time to play, to explore, to learn, to just tinker with new stuff. Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
January 30, 2025
Commentary

Vine 2.0

Edition #478 How AI overviews are democratising search, TikTok is back but is Vine? AI Overviews is democraticising search results. Readers from last week might have caught the datapoint that 63% of sources cited in AI overviews are not found in the traditional top 10 results. Which is super interesting, that information was there before, but it wasn’t in a nice and tidy bundle to be a top 10 result. Which in over optimized keywords was always the… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
January 23, 2025
Commentary

TikTok ban?

Edition #477 What will we do with all that extra attention? TTD makes an acquisition & LLMs drive influx of traffic. So will TikTok be up by the end of the weekend or not? Who knows. It seems unlikely at time of writing. It’s worth mentioning that India cut TikTok back in 2020. So who benefits? eMarketer suggests that Meta and YouTube could capture about half of the reallocated TIkTok ad dollars. Let’s say, US Ad spend on TikTok… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
January 16, 2025
Commentary

25

Edition #476 On advertising to agents, CES & programmatic on planes. Welcome to 2025, with CES in full swing, it is a little quieter in the start to the year. Did you go? Thoughts? I hope you all had a good break. ICYMI here was my 2024 recap. This was an interesting take from Perplexity’s CEO, serving ads to agents. “Aravind explains, Instead of showing ads to humans directly, advertisements would be targeted at AI agents that work… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
January 9, 2025
Commentary

2024 Fin

Edition #475 The last note of the year, themes of note from the year that’s been. The final note of the year, and a little earlier than normal due to how Christmas falls in the calendar. Where to start on the year that was. It feels like the direction of the industry changed quite a bit through the year.  We started with the death of cookies! Then with the ambiguity, it’s kind of gone away. The election provided a… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
December 12, 2024