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 441 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: Google employees internally nicknamed early Hulu 'Clown Co'
“Google people nicknamed it Clown Co because they thought it was obvious it was going to fail because it was, you know, a private equity firm and two giant old media companies.”
Apple's privacy fetish means its Apple TV team lacks viewer data
“There's a story in the information this week, that Apple isn't collecting that, so that Apple's programming team have no idea what people are watching, because of the sort of fetish that Apple have for privacy, particularly Eddie Q, who apparently wouldn't let…”
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: Twitter has huge cultural significance but zero net income
“So and Twiktok is the same, it's like it has this huge cultural significance, but like it's a shitty business and doesn't, it doesn't make any money you have five billion dollars of revenue and no net income”
Evans: Google handed home security to ADT to avoid physical installations
“And a much more recent example is Google handing off its home security product line to ADT. And the theory was that you could turn home security from these boxes that, you know, somebody in a pickup truck comes with a ladder and spends all afternoon putting bo…”
Evans: Google Retreated From Healthcare Over Regulatory and Data Movement Restrictions
“Google tried to do healthcare and got out, because they kind of discovered you were not able to move it to you know, the incentives around, you know, the amount of regulation, the amount of restrictions on what's possible, the way thing, and some of that is fo…”
Evans: Ukraine war produces an unprecedented volume of user-generated content
“And we've never seen that level of UGC content of that kind of war before. Obviously we had it in Syria, but Yemen and so on, but not with this kind of war in this kind of place. So this is new.”
Evans: The automotive semiconductor shortage was driven by older-generation chips
“Well, so ironically, so, so ironically, that's a completely different issue, in that it's most, in that it's mostly older generation chips. I mean, I'm not a semiconductor analyst, but most of what this was, and particularly in, like, the car industry, this wa…”
Evans: Germany is doubling its defense budget after decades of military underfunding
“Germans are doubling their defense budget. Having spent, you know, 30 years not spending, you know, nearly enough and leaving, well, not just not spending enough, but like, you know, there've been all these sorts of stories, like the German Air Force didn't ha…”
Brown: Chinese online platforms receive daily state takedown directives
“Chinese online platforms Receive like a daily guidance from the government about what content they should remove”
Evans: Yandex faces a $500M bond repayment if its stock is suspended
“The terms of the covenant and the bond says that if our stock is suspended for a week, then we have to repay them. And that's like half a billion dollars. And we don't have that. And we especially don't have that given that we can't get any money out of Russia…”
Evans: Running a full MMO on Ethereum is unfeasible
“And of course the Nirvana is everything runs on the chain, but try, try running a MMO, a massively multiplayer online game on Ethereum at like one transaction a second, like good luck.”
Evans: Tim Berners-Lee opposed Andreessen adding the HTML image tag
“Tim Berners-Lee was really angry when Marc Andreessen added the image tag. He thought we were ruining it.”
Evans: US e-commerce penetration returned to pre-pandemic trend line in Q4 2021
“And so they brought out the numbers for Q for twenty-twenty-one yet today, which now puts the U.S. E-commerce penetration almost exactly back onto the trend line from before the pandemic.”
Brown: Shein tests 2,000 items daily with 100-unit production runs
“The Shein inventory is like something like 2000 new pieces of clothing every day. And I hadn't realized that the way their process was done was very much like work on demand, that they produce a hundred of every item, and the moment the item does well, then th…”
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: 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…”
Evans: Shein's US sales likely eclipse Zara and H&M combined
“And, you know, so it's not a tech company in that sense, but this is a company that nobody had heard of two or three years ago that, you know, is probably bigger than Zara and H&M combined in the USA now.”
Evans: Small brands drove most CPG growth over the past decade
“Something like half to two thirds of all the growth in CPG in the last 10 years has come from small brands, new brands”
Evans: More people download software on iPhone now than all pre-2005 platforms combined
“There are more people downloading software on an iPhone now than happened on every computing platform on earth before 2005.”
Evans: Apple's iOS privacy changes shifted ad revenue and hit Snap stock
“And we saw this really clearly, really clear for the first time this summer when Apple makes all these privacy changes in iOS and great chunks of revenue start shifting off other companies, A, either to
Off the platform altogether or be actually onto Apple and…”
Evans: Amazon built Kindle Fire and Alexa to counter platform dependency
“And so there's, for our incidentally for Facebook, just indeed is for Amazon, which is why things like Kindle Fire and Alexa exist. It's they have this platform dependency that is a sort of a strategic threat.”
Evans: Physics hurdles like field of view doomed Magic Leap and Glass
“The problem with that is you can't block out the world entirely. You can't use that to put yourself into a completely immersive experience. There's also part of lots, much harder physics problems in doing that. Can you get the right field of view? Can you get …”
Evans: Major brands spent millions on Second Life islands with zero users
“There was a period of like six months where absolutely every big company was spending millions of dollars each building a Second Life island, like everyone. And it's just like the cost, even if you think, you know, what does it cost to build a second, you know…”
Evans: Telecom broadband competition came from local loop access, not breakups
“You know, you didn't create more competition in broadband by breaking up British Telecom and Deutsche Telekom. You created more competition by regulating access to the copper local loop.”
Evans: No company has publicly solved core optics challenges for consumer AR glasses
“You need something with a wide field of view that's thin and light, that doesn't look like a pair of goggles, that works in broad daylight, that has depth of field, that can occlude things in bright light. Those are physics problems and optics problems, and no…”
Evans: Telcos planned modern smartphone features in 2000 strategy decks
“Now, the inverse of this, of course, is that if we look at everything we do on our smartphones now, telcos had all of this in their strategy presentations in 2000.”
Evans: Tesla lacks competing models for any Fiat or Honda vehicles
“And Tesla is, has a BMW three series competitor and it has a BMW five series competitor and it has a BMW X two competitor. It doesn't have anything competitive to anything that Fiat makes. At all. Doesn't have a competitor, anything that Honda makes at all.”
Evans: Society historically panicked over bicycles, novels, TV, and video games
“People really panicked about bicycles, and novels, and TV, and movies, and music, and computer games, and comic books, and people, people always panic about this stuff”
Evans: Only about 25% of enterprise workflows run in the cloud
“Only about a quarter of enterprise workflows are actually in the cloud if you look at sort of market data.”
Evans: Every large company is using machine learning, often unknowingly
“Every big company has got dozens of projects and more every big company is probably using machine learning without knowing because it's inside something that they've already bought.”
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 …”
Li: Meituan Won China's Clone Wars by Localizing Fastest
“When Meituan first started and they started off in kind of group buying, they were the part of the Groupon clone wars, as it was called. There was, you know, Startups doing Groupon cloning, and then Meituan localized the fosters and went with a different strat…”
Evans: Facebook Tried and Failed to Turn Messenger into a Super App
“Can you turn a Facebook messenger into a super app? Answer. And they clearly tried to do that, and the answer was no.”
Li: Chinese enterprise software lags far behind the West
“Enterprise software is actually relatively I wouldn't say non, I wouldn't say non-existent, but much further behind relative to what we see to the west.”
Evans: Print media decline hit crisis for newspapers in 2016, magazines today
“The lines on the chart have been going in the same direction for sort of 10 or 15 years, it's just they kind of reached a crisis point, sort of for newspapers five years ago and for magazines now.”
Evans: Simple magazine PDFs worked commercially while expensive interactive redesigns failed
“The only things that I gather actually worked were people doing PDFs. In PDF of Model Railway World, they add zero extra cost, and suddenly they can sell globally, whereas the people trying to completely reinvent Vogue or Wired, suddenly you're spending double…”
White: Patek Philippe had no e-commerce and allowed online dealer sales during COVID
“When the pandemic first hit it was the watch brands actually that that were incapable of leveraging any e-commerce whatsoever because they just weren't set up for it. Patek Philippe, for example, had no e-commerce strategy whatsoever. And so, for the first tim…”
Evans: Apple Mail automatically downloads images, masking real open rates
“So the Apple mail app will download all the images. And so it will report a hundred percent open rate for every email that you get. And so you won't know what the open rate is for 40% of your base.”
Evans: US newspaper employment dropped 75% due to lost advertising
“The reason why the newspaper business as a quarter has a 100,000 employees in the US now and had 400,000 employees 20 years ago is advertising. The advertising went away.”
Evans: PwC found 15% of digital ad spend is completely untraceable
“Last year, PwC did a study on this where they said that of the money spent by the advertiser, the publisher only gets about half, because all of the rest goes to all of these brokerage players in the middle. And they actually only could only find, 15% of it, t…”
Evans: Google's post-cookie alternative assigns users to cohorts locally within browsers
“Google's proposal for replacement is that this happens in the browser, that the browser basically builds sort of
Algorithmically determined cohorts.
So there's like 10,015 thousand cohorts, and the browser works out which one of those you're in, but that neve…”
Evans: Digital privacy and competition policy will bypass ad tech insiders
“The policy isn't going to be made by ad tech people. The policy is being made by non-ad tech people, and there's like a huge public argument about policy, privacy policy and competition policy.”
Evans: Apple's 15% fee tier covers 90% of developers, 10% of revenue
“A couple of months ago, they said, okay, if you're doing less than I think a million dollars a year, then it's only 15%. And of course that's a tiny portion of their revenue, but that's like 90% of the developers and 10% of their revenue.”
Evans: Spotify's fixed record label payouts leave no margin for Apple's fee
“This has become particularly an issue for Spotify because Spotify has this structure of their agreements with the record labels. So they're giving the record labels a fixed percentage of the consumer spend. So they can't give Apple 30% because they don't have …”
Evans: Apple rules force Google Chrome on iOS to use WebKit engine
“Chrome on iOS has to use Apple's rendering engine. It can't use their own rendering engine.”
Evans: Google has systematically made Android more restricted over time for security
“Google has pulled much more towards as a more secure model because they started very open and realized all of these problems. And so Google has been sort of systemically making Android more secure over time and more locked out over time.”