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 26 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
Benedict Evans: Meta has spent up to $20,000 per active Quest user
“Yes, I was doing some back of the envelope math earlier, and like, if Meta, you know, like, depending on quite how much they've spent, quite many active users, Meta would spend somewhere between 10 and 20,000 dollars for each active user that they have on this…”
Evans: Facebook's targeted advertising does not sell user data to advertisers
“Facebook sells your data. Okay, what does Facebook do? You're an advertiser, you go on Facebook, you say, I want to show an ad for a playgroup to mothers in Cardiff, and I've got 500 pounds to spend. Okay, we'll show that ad to 500 people that we, to a thousan…”
Evans: Facebook generates trivial revenue from news content
“All my friends at Facebook would basically say, we wish we didn't have news at all. We don't make any money from it. We actually don't make any money from news, although the amount of money is trivial. It's a huge amount of pain and aggravation”
Facebook cleared out Oculus founders for wanting to build gaming consoles
“This is why they cleared out all the team, because they bought a company staffed by people who wanted to make a games, a high-end games console, and they know they don't want that.”
Evans: Telco stocks were flat for 20 years while apps captured value
“Giant industry, trillion dollars of revenue, two hundred billion dollars a year of CapEx stocks have gone nowhere in 20 years, and all the value is built by other people.”
Evans: Temu and Shein Accounted for $4 Billion of Meta's Revenue
“10% of revenue, five percent of revenue growth. And so that's about four billion dollars, and so apparently half of that was Temu, and well, presumably quite a lot of the rest was Shein.”
Evans: Social platforms previously blocked COVID lab leak and mask efficacy posts
“I mean, the kind of the case study here is when social networks decided to block anybody Suggesting that masks weren't very useful during COVID or block anybody suggesting that maybe COVID had leaked from a Chinese biology research lab. And I think now, I don'…”
Benedict Evans: Apple's laptop-grade silicon gives Vision Pro an architectural advantage
“Apple is using a high-end laptop SAC in this thing because they have their own, which has massively better performance per watt than anything from Intel. Guess what Meta has to use? They have to use a smartphone chip from Volcom.”
Benedict Evans: Meta Quest has only single-digit millions of regular users
“So Meta sold maybe twenty million. That you have survey data that says that maybe 10 or 20% of people are actually using them regularly, which is not a great number. So there's like single digit numbers of millions of people using this thing.”
Benedict Evans: Meta has spent at least $35 billion on Reality Labs
“Meta has spent, I think, at least thirty five billion dollars on this stuff. Because they spent like over thirty billion dollars on operating losses for the Reality Labs group, offset a bit by revenue from selling hardware and games. And they bought Oculus, an…”
Evans: Meta spends billions inventing tech, unlike Apple's original off-the-shelf iPhone
“Meta is spending tens of billions of dollars every year on all of that Moore's law, because where Apple could basically sit on top of an awful lot of technology that already existed, like they didn't need to create ARM from scratch. They didn't need to invent …”
Evans: Modern tech company returns occur mostly in private markets pre-IPO
“Tech companies of the eighties and nineties, like 80 or 90% of the returns to investors came in after the IPO. Let's say IPO at a hundred million dollars, and then they end up being a fifty billion dollar company. Whereas for something like Google or Facebook …”
Evans: The claim that Facebook sells user data is factually untrue
“I think the phrase Facebook sells your data is fascinating here, not primarily because it's just factually untrue, but because it's sort of an attempt to come up with a clearer way of describing what somebody thinks the problem is.”
Evans: FTC seeks contradictory consent decrees on Facebook data APIs
“Today's FTC is demanding a consent decree that says Facebook has to open up Data APIs. And two years ago, they got another consent decree that said Facebook has to close down its data APIs.”
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…”
Brown: TikTok Has Stricter Political Ad Rules Than Meta
“And they also have the strictest policy when it comes to political advertising, much more stricter than Meta”
Evans: News is a low single-digit share of social platform posts
“And for them, news is a very small and peripheral thing.
You know, it's whatever it is.
It's low single digit shares, even all the posts that have links, nevermind all the posts that don't have links.”
Evans: 20M VR headsets sold, only 5M-10M active users
“There's like 5,000,010 million people actually using a device, so it's twenty million people, they've sold twenty million headsets, there's five or ten million people using them.”
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: Meta has sold roughly 15 million VR headsets
“Facebook probably sold fifteen million. So there's maybe ten million people using one.”
Evans: Meta's 13 million VR headsets yield only 5 million active users
“I think Facebook's probably sold 12, thirteen million of them. There's maybe five million people actually using them.”
Evans: Threads reached 150 million signups within two weeks
“And it's got a hundred and fifty million signups. And quote unquote, tens of millions of daily users.”
Evans: The global ad market is $600B with half spent online
“Firstly, here is, like, the global advertising industry this year is probably 606 hundred Fifty billion dollars, and at least half of that is online, and that pays for a very large chunk of all the stuff that we use, including Google and Facebook and Twitter, …”
Evans: Google and Facebook hold at least two-thirds of online advertising
“So something like half of online advertising is search, which means, mostly means Google. And then like another maybe 10 or 20%, I'm picking these numbers from memory, is Facebook. So Google and Facebook, between them, have at least two-thirds of online advert…”