Ben Thompson
Founder & Author, Stratechery · 1 appearance on the record.
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Ben Thompson publishes Stratechery, a subscription-based newsletter and podcast network analyzing technology and media business strategy. He pioneered the modern paid newsletter model and established frameworks such as Aggregation Theory.
45statements → 8claims → 2claims resolved → 3.98/5average certainty → 2.33/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 5said about them ↓
1 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted 6 not checkable as stated how the 8 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
6 predictions · 2 assertions · 2 opinions · 30 insights · 3 disclosures · 2 what ifs · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 8 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 6 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Ben argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Streaming will eventually cost consumers exactly as much as their old cable bundles
“What's going to happen is people are going to end up paying about the same amount of money every month they do for content today.
There should be paying different people.
And I think that that's going to be the case.
This idea that there's going to be this, yo…”
Their most notable contradicted claim
Ben Thompson predicts music streaming will soon surpass CD-era peak revenues
“It turns out the music industry is actually in fantastic shape, and their revenue has been increasing a lot, and they're actually going to have, they're on pace to have like their best year ever in like the next couple of years, like even more than like the CD…”
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Ben Thompson on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Ben Thompson said on the Knowledge Project that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Political party gatekeeping collapsed when the internet destroyed media monopolies
“Once the media lost its power and its gatekeeper status, The parties, at the same time, because they were inextricably tied to the media, lost their power and gatekeeping status, and no one sort of realized this happened until, really, Obama came along and cam…”
Platform incentives forced media to cover Trump by replacing editorial gatekeeping
“The news covered Trump because people wanted to see more Trump. They wanted, they, and so the news in media organizations were responding To the incentives that they had in a world where they were no longer gatekeepers, they were sort of serfs in Google and Fa…”
Internet economic power has definitively shifted from controlling supply to controlling demand
“I mean, the, we are switching from a world where it used to be a world where market power and economic power and social power was gained by controlling supply. To a new world where, where power is gained by controlling demand.”
Publishers must distribute on Facebook's terms because the platform owns demand
“The fundamental difference between, let's say, a newspaper previously that controlled the printing presses and Facebook. Is that Facebook has the users such that suppliers, and this being content organizations, new organizations, have no choice but to go to us…”
Building a new mass-market digital advertising business is no longer viable
“The real sort of problematic angle to Google and Facebook is less the consumer front end and more the advertiser back end such that it's not really viable to build a mass market advertising business in the current day because Facebook and Google are so dominan…”
Google would thrive even if all ad targeting and data collection vanished
“And if all targeting and data collection went away tomorrow, Google would still be in fantastic shape.”
Tech giants will be disrupted by paradigm shifts, not direct competitors
“Their sort of upheaval and downfall will come not from someone being in a garage alone. It will come from someone being in a garage who latches onto the next paradigm shift that makes it impossible for, you know, the powers that be to compete.”
The traditional TV bundle will inevitably devolve into an expensive sports-only package
“The long run for TV, for example, the long run is likely that there's
The traditional bundle becomes basically all about sports because sports is better live.
Sports is, is,
Is advertising driven.
And so the business model on that side is going to be differen…”
Streaming will eventually cost consumers exactly as much as their old cable bundles
“What's going to happen is people are going to end up paying about the same amount of money every month they do for content today.
There should be paying different people.
And I think that that's going to be the case.
This idea that there's going to be this, yo…”
Privacy regulations like GDPR disproportionately entrench monopolies like Google and Facebook
“If you realize that there is still going to be digital advertising,
The alternatives to Google and Facebook are going to be hurt way more.
Like is, is every site with advertising on it going to get permission from users for each of the individual ad networks t…”
Total market dominance is the natural end state for platform aggregators
“The implication of aggregation theory is that to be large and to be dominant is the natural state of affairs because of these feedback loops. Like the end state for an aggregator is to be, to win it all, to take it all.”
The subscription economy will grow through niche breadth, avoiding subscriber fatigue
“People are like, oh, Yeah. How many subscription sites can there be? Like, not everyone can have, like, 50 subscriptions. And no, that's not the outcome. The outcome is breadth. There's gonna be so many niches, and there's so many people out there that, that t…”
Facebook's structural disruption of media enabled Donald Trump's political rise
“The structural changes that Facebook has imposed on the media, which is inextricably linked to the power of political parties, is what enabled the lives of Trump, for example, right?”
Subscription publishers should charge for volume, not paywall existing free content
“I'm going to deliver this product consistently for free. It's going to always be there for free. And then if you want more, you can pay to get more. So I wanted the feeling of pain to be a positive feeling where you're getting, this is such great stuff. I want…”
Upfront payments build daily reading habits far better than free trials
“Once someone has given you 10 dollars, like they're going to carve out the time because they feel like they already paid for it. They better do it. And what's great about that is it, it's a forcing function for habit building where people get in the habit of r…”
Airbnb commoditized brand trust by digitizing reputation into a systemic baseline
“What a company like Airbnb, for example, did was it took that trust, which is very hard to build and develop and companies would spend, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars and lots of time on building brands. They basically digitized trust to being this …”
Micro-brands beat legacy CPG by avoiding retail and TV fixed costs
“Like if you don't have to bear huge fixed costs of being on shelf space and running TV ads, you can spend that money on building a better product that appeals to a narrower segment and charge more.”
The internet creates a dangerous barbell economy for mid-tier businesses
“I think the internet has a barbell effect, where there are returns to the biggest and returns to the smallest. And if you're stuck in the middle, it's just a very dangerous sort of place to be.”
Microsoft didn't miss mobile; they were culturally ill-equipped to compete
“Microsoft didn't miss mobile. Microsoft started building mobile phones in the late nineties. Like they didn't miss it. They just were fundamentally inequipped to compete in it.”
Early enterprise tech empowered incumbents, whereas the internet undermines their models
“Like the first era of technology made existing companies and processes better and more efficient. So it was the big companies that would buy big, you know, accounting systems and back end, you know, mainframes. There's a role sort of stuff and it made what the…”
Establishing a new integration point forces the surrounding value chain to unbundle
“If you find a point of differentiation, a way to integrate in a value chain, you can
Build a new value chain, such as the rest, you build a new bundle, and everyone around you unbundles and aligns themselves to you.”
Mega-round growth investing resembles traditional equity markets, not venture capital
“No one is investing at Uber at a seventy-five billion dollar valuation hoping to get a Tenex return. It is much more akin to, I think, traditional sort of equity investing, but obviously with a higher risk profile, a chance, which is Implies a chance for a hig…”
The other half of the tape: Ben Thompson's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 5 times in 1 episode on the Knowledge Project. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Chris Dixon 5
Every mention by year
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2015 5 mentions in 1 episode
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| #40 Ben Thompson: Thriving in a Digital World | Sep 5, 2018 | 1h 21m |