The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 72 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Sacks: Google should be broken up into four separate companies
“Our workshopping this issue has pretty much convinced me that it should be four companies. Search, advertising, YouTube, and Android, because I think Android could be a standalone business because of the value of the search default.”
Friedberg: YouTube is the world's most valuable asset for AI
“So I think it's the most valuable asset in the world today, based on this thesis, that AI value is going to accrue to the data owner.”
Friedberg: Internet platforms are de facto publishers, not neutral access tools
“And in all these cases, from Google, to YouTube, to Twitter, and now to Spotify, the idea of being just an access, a platform for access is proving to be wrong. All of them are de facto publishers.”
Sacks: YouTube removed 1M COVID videos over dissenting views
“YouTube just took down a million COVID videos because they disagree with official position on COVID.”
Sacks: Major tech platforms censor posts contradicting the WHO
“Google, YouTube, and even sites like LinkedIn or Nextdoor are now censoring People's statements if they contradict the WHO, apparently without irony, because nobody has contradicted the WHO more than the WHO itself.”
Emanuel: Talent representation provides crucial executive access for TKO media deals
“Being in the representation business, whether it be Marty Scorsese or Dwayne Johnson or Mark Wahlberg or Peter Berg or Greg, a whole host of my clients, Aaron Sork, enables me to make The deals over at TKO because I'm in the conversation with YouTube, Amazon, …”
YouTube has completely removed its pandemic-era COVID-19 content moderation policies
“All of those sort of policies that existed back then are non-existent today”
Friedberg: Merging social platforms and studio content will challenge Netflix and YouTube
“So I do think that the distribution that Has been delivered by this kind of social media model, like YouTube and TikTok combined with the premium model may end up creating a real category killer that can challenge both YouTube and Netflix.”
Chamath: Google is well positioned to pivot monetization from clicks to tokens
“Google is extremely well positioned to pivot that to price per token. And I think that they have some emergent classes of physical AI, but they have the largest pool of people where they can generate a price per token value framework through YouTube, through G…”
Williamson: 100 TikTok subscribers are worth one YouTube subscriber
“One TikTok sub is worth, you know, a hundred TikTok subs is maybe worth one YouTube sub.”
Calacanis: Google must update terms of service to train AI on YouTube
“I don't think they're allowed to, is what I heard from the insiders. They have to redo the terms of service to get explicit permission to use it.”
Calacanis values YouTube at $400B and Waymo at $50B as spin-offs
“YouTube and Waymo, those would be like a four hundred billion dollar company, a fifty billion dollar company.”
Friedberg: Google's terms of service prohibit training its AI on YouTube
“Under the terms of service, Google's not allowed to train on YouTube data.”
Sacks: OpenAI likely trained its Sora video model on YouTube data
“I think it's pretty clear that OpenAI trained Sora using, you know, available data on the internet, and that probably included YouTube.”
Friedberg: YouTube's data repo is 300x larger than Common Crawl
“In YouTube growing by one to two petabytes per day, which makes YouTube's data repository 300 times larger than common crawl, which makes it bigger than anything else that anyone else has.”
Calacanis: Training data owners will be 2024's biggest business winners
“I am gonna go with, for my biggest winner in twenty-twenty-four, training data owners like the New York Times, Reddit, X, Twitter, YouTube, et cetera.”
Calacanis: Coordinated tech bans dramatically reduce individual reach
“When they got banned across all systems, it was dramatic in terms of the reach of the that information. So because of the size and scale of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc, when they act in coordination, They can, ah, have a dramatic impact.”
Sacks: Bongino was banned for criticizing cloth masks weeks before CDC did
“He was kicked off YouTube for saying cloth masks don't work. Then the CDC comes out two weeks later and says the same thing.”
Sacks: Jon Stewart's lab leak comments would have been censored on YouTube six months ago
“The things he was saying about the lab leak would not have been allowed on YouTube six months ago.”
Calacanis: YouTube took down Bret Weinstein's podcast over ivermectin discussion
“YouTube, which kicked off a ton of people on the platform for talking about things that were not approved by the WHO, has taken Professor Brett Weinstein's podcast down because he had a very reasonable discussion about ivermectin and its efficacy or lack of ef…”
Shirley: Small YouTube channels were demonetized for political content in 2020
“Back in around 20, 20, you couldn't even make political content on YouTube without work with, without being demonetized. For instance, if you were to put Trump in a YouTube title or thumbnail on my channel, you would get demonetized because I was a smaller cha…”
Calacanis: YouTube unfairly demonetizes poker and firearm safety creators
“Poker folks and people who do firearm safety and firearm training and best practices, they're demonetized and they're complaining about it now.”
Mohan denies Calacanis claim, says YouTube monetizes firearm safety content
“We're one of the largest places where those audiences exist, as well as monetization of that type of content.”
YouTube is developing facial likeness detection for AI-generated creator content
“We are working on this notion of, I call it sort of Likeness detection, where if it's a Chamath face the algorithm should be good enough to actually detect that and then give you a choice as to whether that should come down.”
Friedberg: YouTube Restricted Mode filters Tucker Carlson vs. Mark Cuban video
“I can confirm that Tucker and Mark Cuban also get filtered.”
Pichai: YouTube is likely the largest podcasting service in the world
“I think we are the largest podcasting service in the world.”
Samir Chaudry: Distributing on Netflix limits reach for top creators like MrBeast
“Even if I go onto a Netflix, technically I'm actually, I'm limited in distribution if I'm Mr. Beast.”
Andrew Schulz: YouTube forced streaming networks to compete for comedy specials
“I think that what we did is created another marketplace for comedy that the streaming networks had to now compete with. So they were losing comics to YouTube because it was more advantageous to put your comedy up on YouTube and build a following and then go se…”
Megyn Kelly's independent show reached two-thirds of CNN's YouTube audience
“So we did not, in July, we did not beat CNN, but we had two-thirds of CNN's YouTube audience.”
Chamath: Early YouTube code was found on Steve Chen's Facebook laptop
“Like Steve Chen, before he started YouTube was an engineer at Facebook and There was like, at one point, I remember being in some meeting where I was like, oh, I think we found an early version of the YouTube code on an old laptop that was a Facebook laptop th…”
MrBeast: Mystery around execution drives YouTube viewer clicks
“Yeah, the thing is, though, like, the mystery is part of what's cool. Like, how does this random YouTuber give a million dollars away to someone on the street or, like, things like that. So part of it is, like, them not knowing how it's even possible is, is wh…”
MrBeast: Creator ad revenue alone cannot fund multimillion-dollar YouTube videos
“At the moment you don't make that much from ad revenue. So to do these big multimillion dollar videos, it's just not really possible, which is why doing things like Feastables and other products to generate revenue on the back end is why We're able to do that,…”
Sacks claims YouTube removed the viral Pfizer CEO Davos clip
“YouTube banned that video. We had to watch it on Twitter because Elon Musk's Twitter is still free.”
Friedberg: Google acquiring YouTube is the best managed acquisition ever
“It's been the greatest managed acquisition of all time, I should say.”
Friedberg: YouTube beats Netflix in revenue with double the growth rate
“YouTube now has more revenue than Netflix and is growing at likely. 40 to 60% year over year revenue growth rate. Whereas Netflix is, you know, considered one of the fang stocks, you know, one of the top stocks and Netflix only growing at 22%.”
Friedberg: Google deserves credit for virtually all of YouTube's success
“99.999% of YouTube success is because of Google, not because of YouTube.”
Chamath: Section 230 claims are harder to bring against Reddit
“I think it's very hard to pin a section two 30 claim on Reddit as easy as it is YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.”
Calacanis: Team uses recursive AI bots to optimize YouTube headlines
“We are doing it internally Saks. Like we have a bot that is going and saying, go search Reddit X, Message boards, hacker news, and find out what the latest way to do headlines and marketing of YouTube videos is, and then incorporate that into a skill, then sav…”
Hinchcliffe: Kill Tony signed 4-special Netflix deal and hit #2 on YouTube
“I don't know if you guys have heard about it, but a four special deal on Netflix, which is unprecedented by any show, and also we ranked number two at the end of the year on YouTube, only behind my very best friend Joe Rogan, so that's pretty crazy.”
YouTube receives two billion visitors every single day, says CEO Neal Mohan
“Two billion people come to it every single day.”
Mohan predicts advertising will remain YouTube's primary creator monetization model
“Advertising is going to remain, is today, and will remain the predominant way through which we monetize on behalf of creators”
YouTube paid over $70 billion to creators in past three years
“We've paid out in the last three years over seventy billion dollars to the creator economy.”
Mohan: YouTube is more similar to streaming than social media
“We probably have a lot more similarity with, you know, a streaming platform than we do with a social media platform.”
Abram: YouTube became the most watched television streaming platform
“And so YouTube has become, in the last 18 months, I think, the most watched streaming platform on televisions.”
Friedberg: YouTube can attract top creators from broadcast and streaming
“Because it opens up a window, I think, right now for YouTube to suck up some of the best content creators in the world from the more traditional platforms, broadcast and streaming.”
Friedberg: YouTube's audience is over 10X larger than Netflix's
“By the way, the audience at YouTube is over 10 X bigger than it is on Netflix.”