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 83 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
Evans: DOJ e-books lawsuit effectively protected Amazon's monopoly
“The DOJ basically goes to court in order to protect the position of a monopolist. Now that was actually what happened. What they said they were, or thought they were doing, was protecting low consumer prices, which was also what was happening. But the low cons…”
Evans: FTC Chair Lina Khan falsely claimed Amazon sold below cost
“Basically she claimed Amazon was losing money, which was This wasn't true. Or she claimed Amazon was selling below cost, which wasn't true.”
Google pays Apple $20 billion annually to prevent vertical query routing
“And Apple is being paid twenty billion dollars a year not to do anything else here. So they're being paid twenty billion dollars a year not to say this is a hotel's query, maybe we'll send you straight to booking.com. They're being paid twenty billion dollars …”
Evans: Amazon ads function as price discrimination to squeeze supplier margins
“This is effectively a way for Amazon to squeeze more margin. Out of its suppliers as much as it is advertising”
Evans: Amazon Ads Yield Operating Profit Equal to AWS Without Massive Capex
“So if you apply that to 40, forty billion dollars, you get whatever it is, 20, over twenty billion dollars which is roughly the same as AWS, so roughly equivalent operating profit as AWS, And without AWS's 10 or twenty billion dollars of capex attached to it.”
Evans: Product search moved almost entirely from Google to Amazon
“What's happened in the last decade or so is product search has moved almost entirely from Google to Amazon.”
Evans: Most Big Tech sub-threshold acquisitions were under $10M and 10 employees
“And the vast majority of them were less than 10 people, and less than ten million dollars.”
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.”
Evans: Dozens of massive tech companies do not compete with Google or Amazon
“There's an awful lot of fifty, hundred, two hundred billion dollar tech companies out there. You know, how does that model account for everything from Coinbase to Stripe to Shopify to Spotify to you know, Okta to Databricks to UiPath to, you know, there's doze…”
Evans: Cookie Deprecation Only Truly Impacts One-Third of Digital Advertising
“The whole cookie apocalypse thing and the privacy thing and all of this stuff is actually only about sort of a quarter to a third of online advertising because there's YouTube. Which is where video advertising is, there's, well, let me put it another way, ther…”
Evans: Shopify proves claims you cannot compete with Amazon are false
“Number one is it shows how dumb it is to say you can, can't compete with Amazon. And this is absolutely competing with Amazon because it, and it's competing with Amazon by offering a completely different way to sell to customers.”
Fears of Amazon swallowing all retail mirror historical fears about Walmart
“It seems very obvious to me that Amazon is a new Walmart, and worrying that Amazon will swallow all retail seems exactly like worrying that Walmart will swallow all retail.”
Evans: Amazon fails at discovery because shoppers must already know what they want
“The problem with Amazon is you have to know what you want before you go there. You can't go to Amazon and think, I want a book, or I want a lamp. You can't go to the search box and put lamps in, at least only if you want some like kind of pure commodity, but i…”
Evans: Amazon cannot provide true recommendation due to massive catalog size
“Amazon has seven, eight, 900, Amazon has seven or eight or nine hundred million schools, so they can't do recommendation.”
Benedict Evans: Tech has not fundamentally disrupted the book publishing industry
“Tech has basically not been a problem for the book industry. You know, obviously lots has changed, and they've got Amazon as this one giant customer, but we did not move to a model in which everybody gets all the books they want, and all the books are digital,…”
Evans: Most Amazon practices replicate retail playbooks used since 1850
“The invention is how to scale, but most of what it actually does is stuff that retailers were doing in 1950 or 1900, or even like 1860, 18, 70. Like, private label goods was always a hilarious thing. I mean, that, the freak out around private label goods has n…”
Evans: Paid search placement acts as a natural quality and relevance filter
“And if you're going to pay to be there, then the odds are that there's an ROI on that, and the reason there's an ROI is that If you pay to be there, people buy it. And, you know, that is actually a kind of a quality filter.”
Evans: Amazon's $38B Ad Revenue Surpasses Global Newspapers and Prime
“And thirty eight billion dollars is bigger than the global newspaper industry, which of course is now much reduced. It's also bigger than Amazon Prime.”
Evans: Legacy Gatekeepers Held More Power Than Google or Amazon Do Today
“They were old gatekeepers, and they were generally much bigger and much more powerful than Google or Amazon which is kind of a counterintuitive thing to say, but, you know, we came from a world in which there were three TV stations, and mostly Most cities in A…”
Evans: Fears that Amazon's iRobot deal supercharges advertising are delusionally paranoid
“They bought iRobot, which prompted some absolutely hilariously, kind of delusionally paranoid things about, oh my god, Now Amazon is going to have a millimeter scale accurate model of your house, and just think what they could do with that. Now their advertisi…”
Evans: Internet interoperability exists only at low infrastructure layers, not applications
“And the thing about, talking about this with the internet, like the internet is completely interoperable, At the lower levels of the stack with IP and HTTP and SSL and so on. But once you're in the browser, like if you're building Amazon, you don't need to wor…”
Evans: One Medical holds no meaningful market power in US healthcare
“There's no possible basis on which you can say One Medical has any kind of meaningful market power in the US healthcare industry.”
Evans: High US drug prices are a contracting problem, not a logistics problem
“It's not about putting medicine in boxes and shipping it to you. Even the medicine part isn't about the putting it in the boxes part. It's the, what are you paying? And why does insulin cost a thousand dollars in America and 50 bucks everywhere else on earth? …”
Evans: Web clients cannot be cleanly separated from underlying platform data
“What you see when the Amazon screen loads is not just a database output, there's an awful lot of work in that, and so, sorry, I'm being very incoherent here, but like, I don't think you can separate the client from the data like that. Certainly in, on the web,…”
Evans: a16z Never Passed on Deals Fearing Big Tech Competition
“When I worked at Andreessen Horowitz, we saw three or 4000 companies a year. You know, I don't think we ever said, you know, what if Google does this? Or, you know, you can't invest in that because Microsoft might do that or because Amazon might do that.”
Evans: Western tech produces vertical winners, whereas Chinese tech produces horizontal empires
“The sort of text structure in The rest of the world is you tend to have vertical winners. So Google won search, and there's a couple of other people trying to do search. Amazon won sort of generalized e-commerce, not market-specific e-commerce, won general e-c…”
Evans: Artisanal products cannot sell effectively on Amazon
“If you're like a Japanese ceramic, selling Japanese ceramics, you're on Instagram, or you're on Shopify, but you can't sell that on Amazon. You would never sell that on Amazon. It doesn't work. You can't communicate, or, you know, it doesn't work in any way.”
Amazon scales by treating all internal business metrics and operations as APIs
“The theory of Amazon is that everything is an API. Everything is autonomous. Your financial metrics are visible internally. Your business metrics are accessible through an API. So when Germany does shoes, they hire five people, The German shoe team plugs into …”
E-commerce forces a trade-off between operational efficiency and experiential retail
“Do you want efficiency or do you want an experience? Because the reality is you probably can't have both. You can't have the nice e-commerce experience delivered straight to your door versus the efficiency.”
Amazon offers a single infinitely long shelf, not infinite distinct shelves
“There's this cliche that e-commerce has infinite shelf space, and for Amazon it's more that there's one shelf that has infinite length. Everything has to fit on that one shelf. You can't have different kinds of shelves for different things. It all has to be th…”
Shopify's decentralized merchant model proves Amazon will not capture all digital commerce
“Shopify is like the standing rebuke to the idea that Amazon swallows everything. It's a completely different model.”
Evans: Broad omnibus tech regulations like the EU's DSA cannot work
“The alternative is the Digital Services Act, which just tries to define, like, the entirety of the tech industry.
As being covered by a standardized set of rules, and it just doesn't really work.
I mean, trying to cover how Amazon treats its suppliers, it's at…”
Evans: Online fashion sales require curated experience over basic product grids
“Yes, people will buy fashion online, but not with a grid of dresses. You need some, you need something about service, experience, discovery, recommendation, all the other sides of what retail are, retail can be.”
Evans: In-store grocery shopping remains more efficient than home delivery
“There are some cases where internet is not more efficient, like groceries, which is why Walmart is still a giant business, because it's actually more efficient to drive to the supermarket Than it is to deliver all of that product with the cold chain, and the s…”
Evans: Big Four tech capex will jump from $400B to $650B
“The big four companies, platform companies, spent four hundred billion dollars on capex last year. This year, they've said they'll spend 650, more or less. Microsoft hasn't been given full year guidance. But Meta and Google and Amazon have more or less doubled…”
Evans: Big Tech funds AI capex out of cash flow, unlike OpenAI
“Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta are funding it out of cash flow, Meta less so than the others, whereas OpenAI has to do these innovative funding structures because it has no cash flow, and Oracle is basically going to borrow a hundred percent of revenue to…”
Evans: Amazon and YouTube have successfully unbundled Google Search for specific queries.
“Clearly both Amazon and YouTube have unbundled Google in that sense that you go to Amazon for product and you go to YouTube for not just for quote unquote video, but for a lot of other stuff that might previously have been text.”
Evans: Amazon accounts for 40% of US e-commerce, 5% of retail
“It's got sort of 40% of U.S. E-commerce, which is about five percent of U.S. Retail and yet has low prices and it uses market power such as it has to push prices down rather than push prices up.”
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: Operational businesses like delivery and rentals require exact unit economics upfront
“Like, it's all about a very, very small narrow margin, and that's also the story for Amazon, and it's a story for grocery delivery, it's a story for all these one-hour grocery things, it's a story for restaurant delivery, it's a story for dark kitchens it's a …”
Evans: Specialized vertical software on iPads captured restaurants, not Big Tech
“That didn't get eaten by Google, or Amazon, or Apple. It's a generic iPad in a case, and then there's However many software companies, a bunch of software companies that go and solve, this is what restaurants need.”
Evans: Amazon holds 40% of e-commerce but tiny share of US retail
“It's got 40% of e-commerce and like a tiny percentage of US retail, but it has this large market share.”
Evans: Amazon spends ~$10 billion on TV content to retain Prime subscribers
“Amazon has probably a ten billion dollar budget for buying TV shows, which exists as a way to get people to keep their prime subscription and to retain the prime.”
Evans: $31B in Amazon ad spend mostly comes from trade marketing
“Where is the money coming from to buy that thirty one billion dollars of advertising on Amazon? Well, it's mostly coming from trade marketing. It's not coming from TV ads.”
Evans: Amazon ad revenue hit $31 billion, matching YouTube's scale
“And so Amazon did thirty-one billion dollars of advertising last year, which makes it roughly the same size as YouTube.”
Physical bookstores succeed on discovery and curation rather than logistics
“A very large part of buying a book is you don't know what book you want. And so the job of the retailer is not to be, can some retailers at the end point to a logistics chain? Other retailers, they are providing something else, which might be service or experi…”
Top US streamers individually outspend all major European broadcasters combined
“Fifteen billion dollars a year, which is what Netflix, for the sake of argument, what Netflix spends, and close to what Amazon spends. It's also what Disney spend, if you exclude sport. That's more than production budgets for the top, all broadcasters in the t…”
Evans: Big Tech exits markets that require manual labor instead of software
“They want to turn it, particularly for Google, Facebook, Amazon, they want to turn it into automated self-service software. And if it turns out that you kind of can't do that, and you need a bunch of salespeople, or you need a bunch of offices, or you need a b…”