Nov 29, 2022 · 30m · another-podcast
All the other things happening in tech part 1.
0:00 / 0:00
gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Co-hosts Toni Cameron Brown and Benedict Evans look past sensationalized tech news headlines to analyze major structural shifts in direct-to-consumer commerce, creator economics, and retail media advertising.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 74.2% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 7.8 Guest teaching 1.3 Guest disagreement 0.2 The hosts pushing back 0.3
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 10:13 Toni jokes about Benedict's massive presentation decks
Toni playfully pushes back against Benedict calling her out, pointing out that his presentations contain an overwhelming 160 slides to digest.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 6:54 Benedict counters Toni's consumer electronics premiseBenedict reframes Toni's reference to buying standalone cameras by noting that airport electronics stores recently eliminated them entirely.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 10:57 Toni shares Deloitte Gen Z social commerce statisticsToni informs the conversation with concrete survey data indicating that over 60% of Gen Z plan to conduct holiday shopping via social platforms.
The host holds their own ▶ 21:54 Benedict breaks down Amazon's ad business financialsBenedict demonstrates his deep sector expertise by breaking down Amazon's $37B ad unit and explaining why its high operating margin produces superior cash flow to AWS.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anker, Direct Selling, and Commodity Premiumization | 8 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Benedict demonstrates deep analytical expertise, breaking down Anker's $1.8B revenue model, Chinese direct-to-consumer manufacturing, and commodity premiumization with Aesop and Xiaomi. | |
| Infinite Shelf Space, Curated Recommendations, and Search Trends | 8 | 1 | 1 | 2 | Benedict cites his proprietary charts on Google search trends for 'best' versus 'cheap' and teases Toni for not reading his 160-slide deck. | |
| Social Commerce and the Convergence of Retail Budgets | 7 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Toni introduces Deloitte data on Gen Z social shopping habits, and Benedict synthesizes this into an analysis of unified retail and advertising budgets. | |
| MrBeast, Creator Economics, and the Disruption of Television | 8 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Benedict calculates MrBeast's viewing hours against top Netflix shows and YouTube's programming payout scale, while Toni elaborates on creator business flywheels. | |
| Merchant Media: Amazon, First-Party Data, and Digital Slotting Fees | 9 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Benedict delivers a masterclass on retail media networks, dissecting Amazon's $30B+ ad revenue, zero incremental capex margins versus AWS, and modern digital slotting fees. | |
| Technology S-Curves, Market Saturation, and Part 1 Conclusion | 7 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Benedict frames the broader technology cycle around S-curves, explaining what happens after smartphone saturation when deployment-phase innovations take over. |
Statements from this episode (12)
Evans: Semiconductor chips are strategically interesting to tech again beyond Apple
“You know, there's a longer conversation to have around chips, which I think have become strategically interesting to the rest of tech for the first time in a very long time like beyond, beyond just Apple.”
Evans: Anker is a $1.8B company with 10% net income
“Looking up the numbers say now about a 1.8000000000 dollar company. With 50 or 60% gross margins and 10% net income, because all the rest of the money is going to a combination of Amazon and advertising.”
Evans: 30% to 40% of top Amazon sellers are Chinese companies
“Something like 30 or 40% of the top Amazon marketplace sellers are actually Chinese companies.”
Evans: Anker will reach $2B revenue this year, half Logitech's size
“They built, getting on for two billion dollars, will be two billion dollars this year entirely known as a marketplace, which I think is, and that incidentally makes of about half the size of Logitech just as a kind of, as a point of comparison in the accessori…”
Evans: Broken retail channels will create dozens of Shein-like companies
“And I just think there's like, you know, rather like Shin, there's going to be dozens and dozens and dozens of these companies around the sort of the higher level point is everything about the channel and the go to market and the media filters through which a …”
Evans: Google Trends for 'Best' Are Rising While 'Cheap' Searches Decline
“I have a trend, a chart I often show of Google trends for best versus cheap. Cheap is going down and best is going up. The point being that you used to use the internet for price comparison. You knew what you wanted. You went to the internet and searched cheap…”
Evans: Retail budgets for rent, marketing, and shipping have merged into one
“In the past as a retailer or brand, you've had all these different budgets. So there was rent and there was shipping and there was advertising and marketing and pricing and returns and so on. And now these are all one budget. Do I put, do we put the money into…”
Evans: MrBeast viewing time rivals a top 10 to 15 Netflix show
“Depending on whether you think he gets like one minute Per view, or six or seven minutes per view, it looks like Mr. Beast in total would sort of count as like a top 10 to top 15 Netflix show on a weekly, rolling weekly basis, and sometimes more than that.”
Evans: Netflix is a TV company, while YouTube actually disrupts television
“Netflix is a TV company, not a tech company, because all the questions that it poses, the TV industry questions, and it hasn't actually changed what a TV show is. It's just bought more of them and made more of them. Mr. Beast clearly is not a TV show. It's som…”
Evans: YouTube creator payouts rival major TV studio programming budgets
“And then of course they pay out 45% of the ad revenue to the creators, which makes, puts their budget somewhere sort of Makes them sort of top three, top four. If you count that as programming budget, comparable to the US media companies, that would put them s…”
Evans: Amazon ad revenue makes it a top-four global media owner
“And they did, I think, thirty one billion dollars last year, and they've done like 36, thirty seven billion dollars in the last 12 months which gets them to being like a top three, top four media owner. Globally. It's like Alphabet, Meta, ByteDance and then I …”
Evans: Amazon's ad business almost certainly creates more cash flow than AWS
“So it's got to have at least the same margins as Alphabet, which is like 60% operating margin if you exclude the R&D. And there's no CapEx. There's no incremental CapEx. So this thing is almost certainly producing significantly more cash flow than AWS.”