The Ledger
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Evans: Apple Reversed Its Decision to Drop Web Apps in the EU
“Last week Apple said, well, we're not going to have web apps in the EU anymore. And then they said, oh, we changed our mind. We'll do it differently.”
Evans: DeepMind AI Detected Retinal Sex Differences Unknown to Doctors
“I think deep mind was working on a project that was looking at retinas and this system spontaneously started recognizing that there was a difference between male men's retinas and women's retinas, which is not a difference that doctors actually knew about.”
Evans: UK 16-to-34s watch more streaming video than all legacy TV combined
“And so you look at the stats from Ofcom, the UK regulator and UK, 16 to 24 watch more subscription video than everything from the PSB and some public service broadcasters, which is the traditional analog broadcasters. More 16 to 34 watch more stuff from basica…”
Devins: Console gaming base is only 500M versus 5B smartphone users
“Turns out that Xbox and PlayStation combined have an install base of something like two hundred million units, and you add all the, like, the smaller ones, and that's another 50 or a hundred. I forget. How many people, and the PC, hardcore PC games as well. So…”
Evans: Amazon Is Flooded With Spam Products Named After OpenAI Error Messages
“Amazon is overrun. You know, if you saw this link, if you search, search Amazon for I'm sorry, that would break open AI terms of service. And you just got huge numbers of marketplace products where literally the name of the product is, I'm sorry, I can't name …”
Evans: Nvidia Sold $15B in GPUs Last Quarter, Up From $2B-$3B
“NVIDIA sold whatever the number is fifteen billion dollars of GPUs last quarter up from, you know, two or three the same quarter last year.”
Evans: Shein will do $40 billion in clothing sales this year
“Sheehan will do forty billion dollars in, in, in, in clothing sales this year.”
Evans: Over 50% of new US heterosexual relationships formed online in 2021
“At that point it was 40%, and they've run it forward now to 20 21 with a smaller sample set, and there's now over 50%. So basically 50% of new relationships, so 50% of relationships formed in 2021 in the US are formed online.”
Cowan-Brown: 99% of Formula 1 Fans Never Attend a Live Race
“Salesforce did a research About this a couple of months ago, six months ago, where 99% of the fans of Formula One will never attend a race live.”
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: Original Mac and Apple II cost $6,000–$8,000 in today's money
“The original Mac that was like seven or eight grand in today's money. The original Mac, the Apple II was like six or seven grand in today's money adjusted for inflation.”
Evans: Uber has a $500M advertising business
“Uber has half a billion dollar ad business and there's other things besides that.”
Evans: Only 20M to 40M consumer PCs existed before mid-90s internet boom
“There were only sort of 20, 30, forty million consumer PCs on Earth when the internet first started taking off in the mid-nineties.”
Evans: Music revenue rebounded to two-thirds of inflation-adjusted 2000 peak
“And we are now back at the point that revenue from the recorded music industry is sort of two thirds of what it was in 2020 adjusted for inflation, sorry, in 2000 adjusted for inflation and is heading back upwards.”
Evans: In March 2023, four of the top five iOS apps were Chinese.
“Somebody pointed out a couple of, a week or two ago that like four of the top five free apps on the iOS app store were Chinese, and so it's TikTok, but it's also Shein and Temu and CapCut from memory”
Evans: US, Japan, and South Korea now comprise only a quarter of traffic.
“One of the charts in my presentation is that like a quarter of global internet traffic is USA, Japan, South Korea combined. And then another quarter is India and a quarter is China and a quarter is everything else. So like where I was 10 years ago, it was like…”
Cowan-Brown: TikTok executives openly describe the app as entertainment, not social media.
“What I found really interesting is listening to some TikTok executives actually openly describe TikTok, not as a social media platform, but as an entertainment.”
Evans: Global trade marketing spend totals hundreds of billions of dollars
“If you pay a retailer for end caps, if you pay a retailer to put your product On the shelf. If you pay a product retailer to give your product more shelf space, if you pay a retailer to put it like by the checkout, then that's called marketing, not advertising…”
Evans: Walmart generated $2.7B in advertising revenue last year
“Walmart did, I think, 2.7 billion dollars of advertising last year.”
Evans: Uber Reaches a $500M Advertising Revenue Run Rate
“Uber is now at a five hundred million dollar run rate, and everyone, obviously eBay and Pinterest and Etsy want to do this, but also people like Target want to do it.”
Evans: Amazon has 350M to 450M SKUs, many made-to-order
“Amazon has 354 hundred and fifty million scoops. It has sufficiently many scoops that it's actually not a very meaningful number because an awful lot of that is just stuff that doesn't exist until someone orders it.”
Cameron: TikTok Generated Roughly $11 Billion in Ad Revenue in 2022
“And it looks like, I think it was last year that TikTok TikTok's ad revenue was eleven billion, I think, which is pretty high.”
Evans: Asbestos lawyer queries are historically search's most valuable terms
“This has been the most valuable search term since forever because it's personal injury. So you've got it, you get a lawyer, you sue, the lawyer makes a lot, you make, you get a big payout, the lawyer, it's a lot. So this has been one of the most valuable searc…”
Evans: Google's core search operating margin is around 60% excluding TAC
“If you exclude that, Google operating margins are core operating margins for the, like, the actual core search and advertising business are like 60%.”
Evans: Top US TV show reach dropped from 40% in 1960 to 10% in 2020
“So, 1960 Ratings for the top-ranked US show was about 40% of US TV households, and at that point, everyone in America has a TV, like 90, 95% of households have a TV, so basically 40% of Americans, whatever the top show was that year, 40% of Americans saw it, a…”
Evans: Major tech firms are designing proprietary chips in-house
“Everyone from Amazon to YouTube are designing their own chips instead of just buying them off the shelf.”
Goldberg: US and European fabless chip firms plummeted from 2,000 to 200
“20 years ago, there used to be 2000 or so fabless design companies in the US and Europe. Today, there are probably 200 plus a handful of startups.”
Goldberg: Building a modern cutting-edge chip fab costs over $10B
“To build a modern cutting edge fab is, is ten billion dollars easily.”
Goldberg: Consolidated chipmakers now enjoy 60% to 70% gross margins
“There's often only one or two vendors for any given part. And you see, they have, you know, gross margins in the sixties and seventies and operating margins in the twenties.”
Goldberg: Nvidia is writing off tons of GPU inventory
“Today, there's too many GPUs, NVIDIA's writing off tons of inventory.”
Evans: FTC has an active case seeking to unwind Meta's Instagram and WhatsApp deals
“Meanwhile, the FTC also has a case trying to unwind the acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp from now almost a decade ago, which is kind of hilarious.”
Evans: AI has become universal across software and major enterprises
“And now, of course, I'd be surprised if there's any company in tech that doesn't have 200 AI projects. Or that isn't based on AI. This has basically just become a universal thing throughout the whole software, the software industry, and most other big companie…”
Evans: Image generation went from blurry faces to Wes Anderson Alien scenes
“And in the last couple of years, this has gone from being able to do a very small crap blurry thumbnail of a face, To being able to type in give me the chest bursting scene from Alien as though it was shot by Wes Anderson.”
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: 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…”
Eight of 10 Formula One Teams Have Major Crypto Sponsors
“I think eight out of the 10 teams on the grid have a giant crypto sponsor, FTX being one of them, Binance being another, which is also fascinating, but that's a whole other story for another day.”
Evans: Zoom's market cap briefly surpassed ExxonMobil in late 2020
“There was a point in late 2020 when Zoom's market cap was higher than Exxon's market cap.”
Evans: Adobe's Market Cap Dropped Over $20 Billion on Figma Deal Announcement
“The market cap was down more than twenty billion dollars.”
Evans: Adobe bought Frame.io for $1.25B, matching Avid's entire market cap
“Adobe bought that for like one and a quarter from memory. Which interestingly was roughly the same as Avid's market cap and Avid is the leader in pro video editing.”
Toni Cowan-Brown: Figma's customer retention rate sits around 120% to 150%
“As I was doing a little bit of research I went down a rabbit hole on, on how impressive Figma's customer retention rate is, and that it's, I think it's offers around a 120, 150%, which is pretty impressive.”
Evans: Netflix spends roughly $15B annually on content, second only to Disney
“It's you're buying, you're subscribed to Netflix because they spend 50, roughly fifteen billion dollars a year commissioning content, which is more than anybody in the US except Disney.”
Evans: a16z and Sequoia are RIAs buying public equities like Block
“Andreessen Horowitz is now a registered advisor, so is Sequoia, which means they can own public stocks. They own public stocks. I've read that Andreessen Horowitz bought stocks in Square, which is now in, which is now called Block. They bought it in the stock …”
Evans: Apple's 2021 R&D budget equaled its total revenue at iPhone launch
“When Apple launched the iPhone, I think the revenue was about twenty billion dollars. And last year, Apple's R&D budget was twenty billion dollars. It was a four hundred billion dollar company last year”
Evans: Global ad spend reached $650B-$700B with over half in digital
“Global advertising last year was 650 to seven hundred billion dollars, and something like 404 hundred and fifty billion dollars of that was digital, so it's already more than half. And most of the rest is TV.”
Evans: 90% of US TV audience is addressable via connected TV ads
“I saw some data this morning that, like, 90% of the US TV audience is addressable by quote-unquote connected TV advertising.”
Evans: ASOS adds 5,000 new lines weekly and stocks 80,000-90,000 SKUs
“ASOS was this UK, is this UK online only fast fashion company, which does sort of 5000 new lines a week and stocks sort of a 80 to 80 to 90,000 SKUs at any given time.”
Evans: Shein ranks second only to Amazon in US teen brand survey
“Piper Sander does this study of US teenagers, and so what's the favorite brand, and for the last, like, four quarters, Shein, you could see it marching up every quarter, or every, every, every six months, it's a six-monthly survey, and the last two or three su…”