Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Locks podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy remember in like the two thousands or like the financial crisis and everyone you can barely remember last year but go on, and everyone said, oh, it's such a tragedy. People could have been curing cancer, but then they were spending their time coming up with like more and more complex derivatives. And then I feel like for the tens that more too.
All the smart people could have been curring cancer, but they spent their time getting more ads onto like tiny phone screens and stuff like that. This is the whole like software sucking up the entire economy idea. But yes, I do remember that criticism. There was a lot of thought that went into how to best advertise on the Internet, and in fact, I think we had an episode at one point about how the Internet was actually powered purely by that's right, No, I mean it more or less
seems to be. I mean, I guess people do pay for something. But it also feels like that era both sort of from a macro standpoint and maybe a micro standpoint is coming to a close again again another decade pivot because we have seen a lot of these Internet mega companies like meaningfully start to slow growth. The business models aren't firing on all cylinders as they want to are. And then just sort of like tech in general from macro reasons, uh, seems to be it had better days, right.
Interest rates are going up and so a lot of the valuations of big tech companies are coming down. But also to the business model point, I think this is interesting because initially, you know, we talked about very smart people going to tech firms and venture capital and spending a lot of mental energy. They're trying to figure out the business model. But to some extent, it feels like
the easy gains are kind of behind us, right. It was you create a product, you get everyone on your particular platform or using your product or whatever, and then you make a bunch of money. And now it feels like things are changing absolutely. I mean, look at a company like um Facebook for example, is just this. You know, they're really having to work for it, like their their their model is stressed right now, and there's the rise
of TikTok and so forth. Every one of these companies, it feels like, to some extent, after creating a decade of like the best money vacuuming up machines that were ever created are not like they kind of have to really work for it now, yeah, and come up with, let's say, more creative strategies. And one of the things
we've seen recently is something from Apple right. And so one of the stories is that Apple has this incredible position in the ecosystem because so many people own an iPhone and they pull out the first thing they interact with is the iPhone to get to the internet. And they have a lot of power over these other companies in terms of you know what shows up on that iPhone and how right, and and they're having to be more creative and making money off of those products. Right.
The iPhone is getting more technologically advanced. You don't have to necessarily buy one every year. People are holding onto them for longer. So how do you rest more money out of that particular customer base. Such a tragedy. Companies are having trouble resting more money out of their customer base. What a terrible situation. Anyway, that further Ado, I want to talk more about online advertising this world, the challenges all these companies are facing. We're going to be speaking
with our colleague Mark Bergen. He's a reporter here at Bloomberg and he is the author of a recently published book, Like Comment Subscribe Inside YouTube's chaotic rise to world domination. So Mark, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots, and congratulations on the book. Thanks so much, Thanks for having me so First of all, why a book about YouTube? Now? Why don't wait? Why did you do this project? Yeah?
YouTube is this kind of a sleeping giant and social media it's someone described it as like this iceberg that no one ever really talks about as much for a variety of reasons. I see YouTube as both the past and now future of social media. And it was the first company to pay online broadcasters and invented the creator economy. And now we're seeing with TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch, you name, it are all moving in this direction. Social media is
no longer your friends and family and your acquaintances. It is influencers, It is celebrity. It is a game built around in commerce. Uh. And this is a world that that YouTube very much creative. Should we be telling Odd Lots listeners to like, come in and subscribe other podcasts that an effective called action. All right, everyone like comment and subscribe on all thoughts wherever you find it. Okay, but you well, but we were talking in the intro about this idea that the sort of like easy gains
are over for social media, and it is true. We've seen all these new issues also come up, like anti trust when it comes to Facebook and Google, um, content regulation when it comes to YouTube. Who should be the arbiters of what's true and what isn't? Are the easy
days over for social media? I think? I mean YouTube's business has grown tremendously, uh and and part of it was because they really didn't kind of lock into their commercial success until so we only the only data we have available is beginning in seventeen there as business but I was around eight billion last year. It was close
to uh, pretty phenomenal growth. They just took off their the pandemic um when the viewership numbers and we're all stuck at home watching there were studios, how them studios were shut down, like YouTube became the default media aesthetic and uh, you know a lot of kids, a lot of you know, yoga videos, just the hours of just exploded. Um. But that the business has been crippled I think you could make the argument more by Apple's changes than by
any any regular from this far. Alright, let's jump right into it. So Apple, they say, oh, we're the defenders of privacy, and now I always get these alerts on my phone. It's like, do you still want to be broadcasting information to that app? It looks like maybe you haven't rethought this or something, which I imagine is not great for those apps when I click now. Yeah. I mean there were people in in Google and Facebook less
so at Google, but they will gripe privately. Facebook started to do it publicly, like Apple is now building out a search advertising business. They're starting to hire more people like they have. This is a really savvy move. They marketed themselves as the privacy first company. They have restricted online cookies on iPhones and like kneecapped a lot of
potential digital rivals. I think the one way to look at it is, you know this is they are making the They are driving this, this forced movement towards less behavioral and targeted advertising, this sort of foundation for the Internet economy of the last two decades. The cynical view is that they have found a pretty effective way to build out a competing business to Google without the world really knowing it. Well, Okay, so first of all, if you talk to Apple about this, they will say it's
about privacy concerns. If you talk to their competitors like YouTube or Facebook, they will probably say, this is a revenue grap How are you thinking about it? And what are the sort of like clues or evidence on either side. Yeah. I think Google is a really interesting test case. It
has this um friend of me relationship with Apple. They are competitors, certainly in obviously in smartphone markets, Google's kind of got after them a lot around an iPhone, but in their prime Google's primary business of search advertising, like Apples an extraordinarily convenient partner because for a long time Apple Google has been the default search engine for Apple, and now that it's a subject of an Apartment of
Justice antitrust case. Uh. I think this is the chief reason why Facebook meta has been graping very publicly about what Apple has been doing, and you haven't heard a peep from Google. Uh. And in part because their search business is less affected like search business, search ads in
general are less reliant on the kind of third party cookies. YouTube, however, is heavily reliant on the fact that they want to, like, they can serve much better and higher priced ads if they know all the videos that you've watched, all the other websites you visited, you know, all the sort of granularity that this, this entire complex machinery of online advertising
is built upon. So can we actually take a step back and can you maybe explain exactly how the market operated before Apple's big switch, because this is not something that I am entirely familiar with, other than as Joe mentioned, you know, suddenly you get all these notices on your phone saying do you want to opt into data track? Yeah, I mean it it is. I think we're markedly similar to sort of financial markets in it's like complexity and opacity.
Um Like there are effectively like two sided markets right there by side and the sell side where you have you know, publishers that are out there, like have a lot of online real estate and that's everything from Bloomberg dot com in the New York Times to like very popular mobile apps that that and snapchat Twitter right like Twitter has real estate and and and then there are a bunch of marketers that want to get in front
of consumers. Google has the machinery on both sides, like they own both sides of the market, UM and Google has is the world's biggest digital advertising company. They have been for for decades now. The sort of primary way that public online publishers have monetized with Google AdSense. UH that basically ad Sense is the same exact model on YouTube,
just taken over to video. So it is the world's biggest online video advertising service by far UH and effectively is a very easy and increasingly automated system where if I'm a marketer, I'm PNG PNGG spends you know, millions
of dollars and billions of dollars of marketing. I'm gonna go to Google and I'm gonna kind of give them a chunk of money effectively goes through a bunch of ad agencies, and then Google kind of allocate that based on you know, we're going to get this into search in front of people whenever they type a keyword, We're gonna put this on display to put on the Bloomberg dot coms of the world, and we're gonna allocate this to to video, knowing that we can actually reach in
this very hyper targeted way the consumers we want to reach other speculators who might be the equivalent of a hedge fund or trading desk cool by ad inventory just on the assumption that they can flip it and sell it for more than what that person was selling. I even heard of that one. There's certainly like all sorts of middlemen in the industry, and you know there are
time in the era. I'm sure that still happens. But I used to go to all these advertising conferences and you know, all sorts of ad tech companies that you know, they've asked him what they do, and it's just you don't really understand where they sit in the stack. Right, There's just like all sorts of complexities and and they're programmatic advertising companies that just do one thing on mobile.
And there was Bluetooth advertising was a big hot where you could actually like serve an add to a consumer right when they're in front of the coal gate at the aisle. Like this was, I mean, this was we're moving towards this world. And certainly before Apple stepped in of of incredible like they're geo fencing be able to get your cell your data and know your exact location and push alerts and um, I mean this is why it's under so much privacy and antitrust scrutiny is because
it became quickly invasive and incredibly unregulated. So can you talk to us maybe about like how important data targeting or targeting of an audience actually is, because I think we hear these things like oh, it's it makes it harder for advertisers if they're not able to track your data. Why is so important? And like, can you maybe give us some numbers around how valuable a targeted ad is versus an untargeted one. I don't even know if untargeted
ads exist on the Internet. Yeah, well, and just on to sort of add on to Tracy's question, like, let's say I go to golf dot com. Yeah, okay, the ads that I get, like, how much is it he's on golf but dot com he probably wants to be about golf as opposed to ads that I get that maybe you know the last ten sites I went to is like pets dot com or and so my like, how valuable is it for golf dot com to be
able to know that? I also like pett I mean, there there's all sorts of open and unsolved questions about the value and x like precision of online advertising. The classic example is like you go and you buy a pair of sneakers, and then all you see are as for the same exact sneakers, Like it's following you around the internet, right, So I just bought these? Why do you like the world's biggest tech companies that supposedly know a lot about you, Like, can't solve that one pair
of sneakers? I do, but I definitely don't need a second, uh stove, Yeah, I mean I think that to a certain extent. The like the you know, YouTube is a really interesting example in part like they have they built this very a fantastic targeting model where they can like
show an add to a viewer. You mentioned, like if you watch about the golf channels, right, like you're if you're an advertiser, you're going to probably want to get in front of that you know, if you're if you're selling golf gear clubs, you want to get in front of that person that's watching all the YouTube videos. They have this feature, I'm sure, the skippable ad format, which
is a major part of their success. It was because you know, if the consumers actually watching this, because they didn't click the skip button that's worth a lot more money. And if Nike runs an ad that didn't skip, Adidas is going to want to pay more in in this automated bidding system. And this is like Google Search kind of works really well with scarcity to where it's like they can drive up the cost per per mill or
cost per click um pretty high in these scarce markets. Well, let's go back then to the Apple situation directly prior to this policy change. What was an iPhone user giving to various apps when they use them and when did the policy change and what are they getting now from those users? Yeah, I mean some of it is is
really hard to trace. But you know, in if I was an iPhone user and I'm using maybe like a Chrome or even safari um, You're getting a lot of background data and like there's a lot of ad companies you've probably never heard of, or like serving a cookie on you on your um uh, your mobile browsing some of it. There are there are companies that have like invented ways to do um deep linking between when you
bounce from an app to the web. Right, this is this has always been Google's fear of Apple in some ways. Is that Apple is only if your only experience on an iPhone is just moving from app to app, right, Like that is you're you're no longer going through the turnstile of the Internet, which is Google. Um, so certainly amount of data about the websites you visited, how long you link, like, what you click on all those sort
of signals. Is my understanding is like that with now that they've kind of fully eliminated third party cookies, and Google is has said they're doing the same for Chrome,
which is they own the crumb browser. Um it is actually this Google has pushed that timeline back several years I think now as they say, um and so the like basically like these third party sites that do the tracking, uh, will not you effectively will not be able to know um, your Internet history of like what you know if you visit golf dot com and then you got to ESPN. ESPN doesn't know that you lived at the golf dot com. Right. ESPN might just sees you as a sports fan. They
don't see you as like a golf fanatic. What scope do companies have to sort of bypass Apples restrictions on this, Like is there a lot of leeway to still somehow track people even if they've opted out. This is I'm not an expert. Google and face Book have both sort of invented these machine learning models that can like walk in backwards right kind of exactly. They both have different like jargon e names for the for the services, but effectively that's it, like, Oh, we're gonna, uh, we're gonna
put you in a group of people. I'm gonna keep going back to this golf example. We're gonna put you in a group of We don't know that that you, Joe are are actually visiting this, but we know that there's enough like golf fans doing this activity or using this app, and so we can approximate. I mean, the the real issue here is that there's Google and Facebook. You know, I have been in a duopoli in this world for a very long time. That is the third.
The actual challenger now is Amazon, right, Like certainly not a small company like Amazon's as business has grown tremendously in the past few years. Uh, and they're less threatened by this because they also it's all in house. Right, Amazon's business is based on like the activity on on Amazon properties. Um, so that's one way that that that
companies have got around it. The big push also that all the platforms, you see how much of ad tech companies have pivoted towards commerce, e commerce, especially during the pandemic. For what it's worth and for listeners. I don't even golf and I don't have a pet, so I don't know why I use those examples. I just needed to get that out of there. The ad is that I have been getting on Instagram lately have been absolute garbage.
The worst target in Is that true? Okay? Because the ads that I've been getting on Instagram because I I experimented with this, because I got really interested. I was like, where are they getting this info from? It seems to be coming in through Google. It's like if you do a Google search, it shows up on Instagram. Yeah, there's the one that they always have the debunk, which is
like if you're talking micro right. I tried that too. Yeah, my husband and I did baby carriages or not having a baby, but just as an experiment to see like what would show up? Nothing if you talk about them in front of Alexa, But if you Google search for it, they show up on Instagram. I mean Google, weird. Google for a long time we kept trying to keep They had like a state in church and state separation from like search and rest of display. Internet started changing, uh
and and um. In part that was just about a financial concert, like they wanted to give more data that they add tech industry. It was just a bigger growth.
But for a long time at least they said, and and and people I've talked to the early days like have this almost religious belief that like you're searching, I mean, you know, Google has our most intimate data, right, like the things we're searching for, we tell Google things that we wouldn't tell our spouses is going to write like uh and so like that search data is incredibly valuable to a marketer if they're you know, trying and selling
pharmaceuticals or lawyers, right, Like those kind of those are the industries that typically have incredibly high search ads because there are people that are really in demand for for a particular thing. Instagram is I mean Facebook, because you know, it's so funny. People talk about how crappy the add qualities are. And yet like there as business certainly has been suffering because of Apples changes, but it's still that right, But like the one of the two kings of the industry. Well,
then talk about what we've seen specifically. So when you say okay there, because this is the core of the whole thing when we talk about their businesses has started to suffer because of the policy changes that Apple has made. What are we seeing concretely in terms of how it's spilling over? Yeah, I mean, like the dollars. I think some of this was, you know the fact that they're like macroeconomic factors, and for marketing, there's the war in
Ukraine and there's just the pandemic in general. But but in part you know, if you're an advertiser, in your choices are between say like television or Billboard ad and and Facebook. The argument for online has always been like you know that there's a joke about TV like I don't you put your ad up there? And you have no idea who's watching necessarily? And um, that's just sort of like brand advertising, right and and um in the
industry there's brand and there's direct response. In the direct response as are the one where you want people to make it an immediate action, like you want them to install an app, buy a thing. Um. This so this is you know, Apple's changes have made it much more difficult to do that, and so there's they're getting you know, there have to be more reliant on on brand advertising that sort of contextual Just just to be clear, do we know like have they put a dollar amount or
Facebook put it amount on there? Actually and I don't have it off the top of my head. Um. I mean, their market cap has taken a huge it and some of it is regulation, but have they really been regulated? Yeah, Like it's just there's kind of just the specter of regulation. It's not like Congress hasn't gone after Um. The only real big tech regulation and I talked about in the book is the FTC went after YouTube for illegally targeting
kids with with collecting data on children under thirteen. Um. And and that's another area where like there's this whole online academy that then unregulated and and you know you're not allowed to collect data on children under thirteen, yet a lot of companies have done that. I mean, we don't know the numbers for YouTube, in part because they don't share their financial data. But what was what was meant as market drop valuation dropping the test? I don't know,
but definitely I'll just say this I'm not. Let's say, actually the stock went from around three six one sixty and the market cap at the peak of was about one point six trillion, and now it's Facebook, So then okay,
of that roughly half a trillion dollar market cap. Has anyone made an attempt to say how much can we ascribe this to Apple and the change that change in the online Facebook's business is primarily mobile advertising UM and iPhones, and there was a new stat I think recently that they're now that they just lead probably Android in the US, the most popular UH system. Apple has historictly been UH the Apple phones just to make a lot more money
per user than Android phones do. And so we can assume that Facebook makes a lot more money on on iPhones than on Android, and so that is the bulk of their busines this and I think it's you could say, like a significant impact. So you mentioned antitrust a number of times, and also the sensitivity of like Google complaining about what Apple is doing, given that they have a slightly different relationship with Apple than something like Meta, and
also given that they're under um antitrust scrutiny themselves. But what are the chances that we do get some sort of antitrust action when it comes to Apple and their transparency push, because it seems like it seems a little difficult. It's like, on the one hand, well, you you know, you own the product, you're making it a waltz garden, you're cutting people off from it. But on the other hand, you say you're doing it for privacy reasons. Right, that
should sound good to regulators. Right. They've had more Apples, certainly him we're pressure around the app store and the accusation that they're running on like an app store monopoly or or and that you know, if you own an iPhone,
you be're basically like Apple is the gatekeeper. Um and and and I think there's digital advertising, and there's certainly companies in the advertising space to complain about that, like Apple, one movement from Cupertino has single handed that like has huge ripple effects for this multi billion dollar digital advertising world. I think that as Furries, I understand, Apple has faced some in Congress and the epic lawsuit the creators of
Fortnite is sued. Apple also sued Google, but they've really gone after Apple. Um about this is about app in store app fees for for Fortnite games. I think that, like for Google's case, the most likely outcome from any antitrust might be to kneecap some of their attack and and like the way the digital advertised worms, So what about for small businesses that I mean, this is the
argument in favor of like hyper targeted advertising. That's like I can get like, are you looking for a new dentist in the east village or Chief Lightening or something like that could we have hyper targets? Oh my god, how did they know I need a Chief White? I'm doing video for odd lots now I'm doing I need Chief Lightening. You hear about these complaints, but sometimes you can't tell if it's like astroid turf, like some group that Facebook like may have like encouraged like how real
is this? For the companies, they were able to find a model because they're really good at, like, you know, finding their exact potential customers and Facebook. Part of the success of Facebook and Google has been the long tail, like the mom and pop advertisers. Facebook has leaned into this a lot as a response to Google as well. They're going to as office and Congress and saying like, why are you trying to hurt small businesses right, and
like that might be a compelling argument. Um, certainly it has politically like for a P and G, like everyone is going to buy laundry detergent or something, right, but its so for them, I don't know if they need as hyper targeting as like yeah, I mean like P and G level, they basically operated as like a they'd like and they have all these agencies that effectively operates consultancies and like they're looking at spread like they're running
as with spreadsheets and algorithms and like moving the numbers around and so yes, Um, I think that is somewhat compelling. Um the fact that there and probably going to continue to like they know the argument that that Facebook and Google will make despite these changes around we lose some
of our our targeting and richness. Um, the audience is still here like like relative this has been Like YouTube's argument for for over a decade now is like compared to television, there are so many more people and someone where hours spent on YouTube and that the amount of
money marketing dollars spent on television is not proportionate. Like if you need, if you're like want to, if you want to challenge and there's been some challenger brands in CpG, right, like the challenge the real smart challenger brands will like be where the kids are and we'll be like get in front of the audience on digital and do like sponsored content deals and and like can lean into digital advertising.
That's that's effectively worked, right, Like these companies have grown because that argument has worked and money is moving over from TV to the Internet. What exactly is Apple searching
advertising business? Like there's an Apple search engine? Right? Like what exactly are we talk about when we say Apples really Like, I mean there is their Siri, which is an Apple search engine in some ways, right, Um, there's the app store, which I think is that's where the expect like if you look at the Tea leaves on where they're hiring and putting resources it is to run
like effectively like a search advertising business in the store. Yeah, Like you want to promote um, I don't know, like you're searching for like Uber and lifts, Like I want to like spend money to be up the top result when you search for Uber and then people are going to click on lift. Right, So what's the sort of like game plan from the facebooks of the world or the YouTube's of the world, Like what can they do
to actually try to offset this? And I guess a very extreme example, but you know, could I don't know, could Facebook like launch its own phone or something like if the idea is to get as close to a customer as possible. Well this, I mean Google has like I'm got a pixel Google Pixel in front of me, in part because it's a company I cover and and Google pickels. Pixel was a response because like they Google
has Android open source software model. They give away their software for free to Samsung and like a galaxy of pun intended a galaxy of handset makers um and that they like for a long time. Like Google was like, okay, these will be rivals to Apple, and it hasn't really happened in Apple, like I said, has just premium, like people spend more money on iPhones. And then I think Google saw in part they're investing in Pixel because they saw this world. They're like, oh, our digital advertising model
is not going to last for a long time. We need to own and operate the actual hardware. We reported on this quite a bit. Facebook has tried several times, looks like I mean their company is now pivoting towards like I think Mark Zuckerberg's bet is that we're going to stick a phone in our face and he's going to own that right and like, so that's there. They've renamed the company meta, like Facebook's existential crisis has always been like Google and Apple owned the operating systems where
they make the most of their money. And so the movement the metaverses Facebook will why are we even recording this altogether at a studio? We could be like the Google and YouTube and and the rest of social media
is commerce, like pushing commerce pretty aggressively. Um, and this looks like I think more ways to purchase directly, buy something directly on Instagram, for instance, UM, buy something directly in a YouTube video, Like I think they're running into like the the uncanny valley of how much do you want social media to look like the home shopping network? But the YouTube and part of the reason I wrote this book because it really fascinating, like they've built up
the millions. There are about two million, over two million creators that make money on YouTube. That number is actually down from when the company had to make it a little bit harder, but that's a lot of that's just that's a whole economy. So many of them are now comfortable because the uh because of it's been harder and increasingly harder to make money and then to make now
with with Apple's changes higher ad rates online. So they're moving towards and you can if you watch enough YouTube, you like a lot of them have sponsored content deals, right or they're just like trying to sell their merch and their merchandise like tabs and they're looking in the channel I think there are they're experimenting TikTok because also moving in commerce like that is a direct response to Apple into privacy regulation, um cutting out, carving out the
like the profitability of about online ads, so you know, just less big picture. Did it feel like this is the end of you know, Tracy mentioned like if I don't remember when we did it three or four years ago, someone came on and talked to us about the extent to which the entire Internet is all adds And does it feel like the does this feel like a turning point?
Because then and I don't want to even like talk about I don't even want to say the say the word, but like web three and this idea like there's gonna be like something else that's like we have to like buy coins. I'm actually surprised we've made it like no ads, we just like buy coins from market and reason in order the internet like that, Like is that is this
a turning point? Is that the the possibility of web three nowithstanding, Like the criticism of the in Reasons of the world is like, look at this, this economy we built around them advertising is not the world we want. And like I think I was sharing an anecdote from the book, which is, you know YouTube started like a decade ago. YouTube was not making money. It was it was unprofitable um and they had they they were trying to after the financial crisis, They're like, Okay, we need to make
money from this thing. And there was an ads manager who gave a presentation on stage about how they were going to do it, and Sergey Brenn, who this is not confirmed, but Sergey Brandon, my reporting brand is a founder of Google Worth, one of the world's wealthiest men, largely based on a search advertising business, made a joke about how you know how the YouTube ads were like he interrupted the speech being like ha ha, Like YouTube ads are interruptive disruptive and we five point seven billion.
But like the founders of Google have never at that point, the founders have like notoriously never loved advertising as a business model, like it has clearly been successful for them, Like they will make a descript like a lot of them will be like search ads, search ads, You're delivering a thing that you really want and the rest of the ad is kind of icky, and like there's a sense it's this weird irony and the fact that they're the biggest online advertising company and yet a lot of
people that work they're like don't love this. It's kind of sleazy market Like people in marketing names. I think they think of it as like old economy, right, like ad sales absolutely true, and so web web three whatever. Like I think that you can the sort of case inside Silicon Valley is like here's a chance for us to reinvent ourselves. In Google's history, like in the past decade, they've been just trying to find a business that's not
reliant on as cloud computing is the main one. You know, YouTube has subscriptions, there's YouTube TV, there's common Like they have been always searching for ways to move past this um in part for all the reasons we talked about, in part because they don't love it, uh And but at the same time, like you know, YouTube was once it's competing with Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney on original programming and subscriptions, they mostly dropped out there, like let these
companies like bury themselves competing for subscribers, and We're just gonna continue to dominate a pretty good, marching heavy business even after after changes like on I askin remains a pretty successful business in Google's testament for that. Mark Bergen, congrats on the book, and thank you so much for
coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. So. I thought that was really interesting, Joe, and the whole transparency pushed by Apple was not something that was really on my radar other than I sort of like clocked it a little bit when I was using my phone, but I hadn't a thought of the impact on other businesses. I thought it was interesting what Mark was saying about this idea that for a lot of these big tech companies, like they want to get away from the business of
ad sales. And it feels like that almost from inception, like there's almost an aversion to anything to do with media from the tech companies, even though ultimately they're in the business of selling media, right, Like, no one actually wants to be a content producer, at least YouTube does it. Um And when you you know, this idea of actually having to go out and sell ads, like it does seem kind of old fashioned. It does. And I remember thinking about that too, because when like Google came on
the scene, it's like this sort of wow factor. It's like there's magical money machine because you tell the computer what you're looking for and then that's the most amazing form of ads. But then then a few years later and they probably have like whole teams internally dedicated to like taking ad sales buyers from Procter and Gamble to the US Open or like taking them out for wine and stuff. Is like, man, this is like this is kind of like old school. This doesn't seem very techy
to me. Yeah, And I guess my other big takeaway from that conversation is we should be telling people to like, comment and subscribe, right, We should definitely be telling people
to like, comment and subscribe, So please do that. Uh, if you're listening, you know, just one other thing, you know, it always seems and Mark was talking about like the sort of the incredible ecosystem of ad tech companies and how there's like nine middlemen, right, And I've always thought there was an interesting and I asked that question about speculators, like there's the interesting analogy between online ads and financial markets, whereas you might find an edge at some point like oh,
this capacity space is really cheap here, or I found a really cheap way to get in front of these high dollar clients, and then everyone discovers it arbitrage really quickly. So it's like and then the search for the new one, and so you think, why is there this's like endless parade of ad tech companies and it's like everyone like trying to find that ORB. But look, if data is gonna be harder to come by, that's gonna people are gonna have to really put into more work. Yeah, and
then the question is what is the new edge? Because people got so into targeted advertising, like what comes next? You know, we don't talk about like tech business a lot. Maybe we should talk about because it's just there's so you know, these companies are obviously so important in our entire life. For many many years, we haven't really had to talk about tech business. The share prices they just went up. They just went up. But uh yeah, Now I guess the question is is the future is like
to use the internet. We got to buy a coin from from Jeris in Horwan's all right on that happy note. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there? Okay. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway, and I'm Joe Wisn't Though. You can follow me on Twitter at the Stalwart. Follow our guest on Twitter, Mark Bergen, He's at m h Bergen, and check out his new book Like Comments. Subscribe inside YouTube's chaotic rise
to world domination. Follow our producer Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armine and check out all of our podcasts at Bloomberg under the handle at podcasts. Thanks for listening.