| I’m looking for a writer to help with a regular piece each month. Sharing here in case any readers know someone who fits the bill.
One big thing
Continuing last weeks thread on Owned stacks, Benedict Evans had a timely piece on unbundling advertising. Much of it we’ve discussed prior, but a nugget was that for many of these platforms. Advertising is like found money.
If you have a big platform, with a lot of eyeballs, by virtue of your primary business. Adding in advertising is found money.
“Amazon’s ads should be higher margin, given that it’s mostly leveraging the core businesses’s existing cost base (in other words – this is ‘found money’), but even assuming the same 60%, that would be $18bn of operating income in 2021, almost exactly the same as the $18.5bn that Amazon reports for AWS”
The challenge for any primarily advertising business is they need those margins. So they try to compete on subscriptions. And this is the duality, primary advertising, value subscription. Primary subscription, value advertising. And in the middle you have brands just trying to cut through. And either side of the equation looking for found money.
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