As cookie-based ads go away, does the targeting move from the cloud to the client, or from the reader to the content? Does this make the strong stronger? Or does the money go to Fedex instead?
Read More
20 years ago Apple seized music, and turned it into a lever for its broader business. It failed to do the same to TV, and lost control of music, but won massively in games, where it now makes more money than the entire global digital music industry. Now, perhaps, it’s looking at advertising.
Read More
Amazon has scaled indefinitely by treating every product as an interchangeable packet, and by not caring what they are, only what they weigh. At a fundamental level, it doesn’t know what it sells. What would happen if it could change that?
Read MoreWe’ve been arguing about app stores for a decade, but now the EU is going to change the rules. Will that actually matter, or is it just a $10bn wealth transfer to a few games companies?
Read More
As we come out of lockdown, UK ecommerce penetration is 50% higher than the USA. What does that do to retail, and to startups, if it sticks?
Read More
Can we get content moderation to work, or is it as much of a dead end as virus scanning? Do we need to change the whole model of social instead?
Read More
Retailers have sold private label products for a century or more. Is something different when Amazon does it?
Read More
When software eats the world, the questions that matter stop being software questions.
Read More
People talk a lot about AWS as Amazon’s cash cow, but the ad business buried in the back of the accounts might be just as profitable.
Read More
We’ve been arguing about newspaper business models for a decade, and none of the questions have changed, but now things are heating up. Should internet platforms ‘pay for news content’, and is this a competition problem, or is this really a tax on links, and a subsidy?
Read More