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 32 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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: 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: Linear TV ad slots will disappear within 10 years
“Half of the ad, global ad industry is still on TV. And that's not going to be there in 10 years' time, or it won't be quote unquote TV. I mean, this is this whole, what is TV? You know, is Disney, you know, if you watch it on your smartphone, if you watch YouT…”
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: Spinning off Instagram or YouTube will not make competing easier
“If Instagram was a separate company, that wouldn't make it easier to compete with them. Because the network effects that make it hard to compete with Instagram are part of Instagram. They don't come from it being owned by Facebook. The same thing with YouTube.…”
Evans: TikTok competes with YouTube rather than Instagram due to graph mechanics
“I would actually argue that Instagram is about people you choose to follow, and mostly people you know, whereas TikTok is about people you don't know. It's a completely different graph, and it's a recommendation-based graph, not a people you've met-based graph…”
Evans: Breaking up Instagram or YouTube would not reduce harmful content
“If Instagram was a separate company, that wouldn't have any effect on teenage girls looking at self-harm content on Instagram. If YouTube was a separate company, that wouldn't have any effect on the prevalence of jihadi content. That's not a competition proble…”
Evans: Splitting YouTube from Google would not spark video competition
“Today, if you split YouTube into a separate company, that wouldn't result in 10 new social media video sharing sites exploding.”
Brown: TikTok Gives Americans a Taste of Foreign Tech Dominance
“Saying that, like, basically Americans are experiencing what the rest of Europe has experienced over the last 10 years of, yeah, your citizens are loving a piece, a social media app that wasn't designed by Americans for Americans with Americans in mind.
yeah,…”
Evans: TikTok fundamentally competes with YouTube, not Instagram or Facebook.
“I think there's a sort of it's almost like an incorrect analysis, which was, I'm trying to think of the right word, which is like, we kind of went down the line of thinking that TikTok competed with Instagram and Facebook, as opposed to thinking that it compet…”
Cowan-Brown: Most creators view TikTok as an intermediate stepping stone to YouTube.
“Most people are creating short form content on TikTok, but that doesn't feel like the end goal. It feels like the end goal is then moving to YouTube or moving somewhere else. Whereas I can see more YouTubers being like Marques Brownlee or Mr. Beast was like, n…”
Evans: TikTok's algorithmic flow prevents creators from building a permanent owned audience.
“I don't get the impression that TikTok has that same mechanic of, like, I can build a permanent audience there, and that it's more that you are more dependent on the river, on being thrown up to the river, because, you know, TikTok, YouTube gives you all these…”
Evans: TikTok differs from YouTube in UX, not fundamental product capability
“TikTok is not Different to YouTube in any sort of fundamental product sense. It's different in UX.”
Evans: TikTok competes with YouTube rather than Instagram
“Is TikTok competing with YouTube or Instagram? And it still puzzles me, like everyone always puts it on the chart with Instagram, and I'm like, no, no, no, I think this is YouTube.”
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: Apple and Google suffered a complete strategic failure in TV
“This is another piece of the story is Apple and Google sort of complete strategic failure in TV. What Apple and Google wanted to do and what Apple wanted to do with the Apple TV and indeed with the Apple TV app they have now. And remember the Apple TV original…”
Evans: Breaking up Big Tech does not make competition easier
“If Instagram's a separate company, that doesn't make it easier to build an Instagram competitor. If YouTube's a separate company, it's not easier to build a search engine or build a competing video sharing site.”
Evans: TikTok's innovation is its discovery mechanics, not the video format
“The new thing about TikTok is the swiping and the recommendation. So it's the, you could call that a network, but it's the mechanics that you build around how you show people what the video is. As opposed to YouTube, which is a basically a very desktop, very l…”
Evans: Google's UX is inherently bad; TikTok's UX is the innovation
“YouTube is a utility that distributes video. But the UX itself, A, it's a Google UX, so Ipso facto is shit, but B, like, the UX is like a utility UX, whereas for TikTok, the whole point is the UX. That's where the innovation is, and the UX is pop culture.”
Evans: The idea that a standalone YouTube would build a search engine is insane
“Like, I genuinely heard somebody say the other day that if YouTube was a separate The company, the first thing it would do would be make a general purpose web search engine and compete with Google. You're out of your fucking mind. That's like saying that if yo…”
Evans: The tech industry largely ignores TikTok compared to Twitter or YouTube.
“Everyone uses YouTube, and everyone sort of knows that TikTok is this big thing, but the sort of tech conversation in general doesn't talk about what's happening on TikTok. I don't think in the way that it talks about Instagram or YouTube or Twitter. And that'…”
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 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.”
Evans: TikTok, Shein, and Instagram users act as a giant Mechanical Turk
“And what you have in TikTok and what you have in Shein is you've got enough people looking at it that you've actually got that feedback loop. So basically the Shein user base or the TikTok user base is almost like a giant mechanical turk. Telling the system wh…”
Evans: YouTube historically relied on watch data rather than video understanding
“Until very recently, or, you know, maybe now, YouTube doesn't know what's in the videos. They have no idea what's in the videos. They know who watched them.”
Evans: YouTube and Instagram formats are easier to monetize than Twitter
“The challenge, of course, is YouTube and Instagram have forms of media that are much easier to monetize, and much easier to think, how would you create something rich and engaging that you could monetize, whether it's e-commerce, or advertising, or something e…”
Evans: TikTok Is a YouTube-Style Recommendation Engine, Not a Follower Graph
“TikTok is a different kind of format, but it's also a different network. And it's actually much more of a YouTube sort of network where it really isn't people that you know. Obviously it's all about the recommendation because it's partly because it's all about…”
Evans: YouTube will soon be blocked in Russia
“I think YouTube is blocked, or if it isn't, it will be soon.”
Evans: Amazon generated $31B in 2021 ad revenue, topping YouTube
“This quarter, what had previously been sort of implicit in their results, so they have this line in the back of the account, it's called a breakdown of their revenue, and they had this line called other, which they say is predominantly advertising, and this qu…”
Li: Bilibili is multifaceted and makes most money from games, not video
“Most people also reduce it to China's version of YouTube, but when you look at it, it's actually very multifaceted. You know, it gets most of its money from mobile games, it does advertising, it has live streaming, it sells e-commerce product on top of it, so …”
Evans: Clubhouse functions as a Napster for conference panels
“But it's clearly, amongst other things, like a Napster for conferences, for conference panels. Something I've said several times before was conferences are like a bundle of, there's presentations, there's panels, there's talking in the hallways, there's the si…”
Evans: Big internet platforms operate as Mechanical Turks powered by human biases
“You should think of any big internet platform as basically a Mechanical Turk. So PageRank is a Mechanical Turk. Because PageRank, the whole point of PageRank is instead of trying to work out what that webpage is, Probably should have said this earlier. Instead…”