Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Privacy regulations like GDPR disproportionately entrench monopolies like Google and Facebook

Ben Thompson · #40 Ben Thompson: Thriving in a Digital World · Sep 5, 2018 · at 1:26:26

Stratechery founder Ben Thompson discusses with Shane Parrish how data privacy mandates like GDPR disproportionately hurt independent publishers while protecting tech giants reliant on first-party data.

0:00 / 0:50exact quote · 50.3s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 that runs on the site? Like if you think about the barriers as opposed to a Google or Facebook, which has so much internal data, like Facebook has lots of data. You already told Facebook if they were cut off from all third party data, they would still be fine. If Google is cut off from all third party data, they're still fine. If a publication is cut off from all third party data, are they going to be fine? No, they're going to be in, in much more trouble. And I think you're, this is going to be a challenge, such a challenge with government action going forward is the most obvious solutions are going to lock in the biggest players are going to lock in the incumbents.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Ben Thompson

Insight
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…”
Ben Thompson Sep 5, 2018 ▶ 43:11 #40 Ben Thompson: Thriving in a Digital World
Insight
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…”
Ben Thompson Sep 5, 2018 ▶ 43:48 #40 Ben Thompson: Thriving in a Digital World
Insight
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.”
Ben Thompson Sep 5, 2018 ▶ 44:59 #40 Ben Thompson: Thriving in a Digital World
Insight
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…”
Ben Thompson Sep 5, 2018 ▶ 45:16 #40 Ben Thompson: Thriving in a Digital World
Insight
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…”
Ben Thompson Sep 5, 2018 ▶ 1:01:16 #40 Ben Thompson: Thriving in a Digital World
What-if
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.”
Ben Thompson Sep 5, 2018 ▶ 1:02:13 #40 Ben Thompson: Thriving in a Digital World
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.