David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Right. As evident, actually by shorts, that works a little bit different on their platform. They're all different too because shorts, obviously, you have many more potential impressions over a shorter period of time. An average YouTube video has been X minutes, and that means more interstitial ads. Then we have host-read ads or the equivalent of more native ads or paid promotional ads to both Instagram and YouTube. We're living in an ecosystem where on the one end, 10–15 years ago, we were very primitive in terms of monetization. Today, it is very, very different. I think about it in a way like this is not too dissimilar from mom and pop shops that are coming up in the US as a cultural norm. On the one hand, you had physical infrastructure, urbanization, driving these things, where we both created these mega Walmarts of the world as a direct consequence. But actually, the complete opposite was also true. We have this hyper local thing, et cetera. If you think about it today, these mom and pop stores, the ones that are still around, they're hyper distinct in what they're offering. They're really focused on community in many cases, really knowing your customer, they're offering events around their stores. They're offering, obviously, online things through Shopify and so on and so forth. In a way, I think about it in a very similar way for the creator economy too. We had to start very simple. It was based on a very simple model, where there were free ad supported platforms and paid platforms. All of that is not merging together. In addition to that, just monetizing the content in itself is probably becoming an auxiliary revenue source around them, 360, very similar again, to mom and pop shops, where we could do live events. You could be doing merchandising. You could build another business like Kylie Jenner or something on the side. What's cool is this is true at scale now, too. Taylor Swift monetizes through everything you're talking about, the same way a mom and pop coffee shop does who just doesn't scale. It's necessarily had to be because streaming, while at first, it looked risky, and then turned out to be—I don't think it's blowing smoke to say, you guys save the music industry—it is the thing that while the industry was in dramatic decline, ended up making it so that the music industry now generates more revenue than it ever has before with by far the largest thing being streaming. At the same time, if you're a Taylor Swift or you're any big artist, you're not making as much money streaming as you would have on CD sales in the CD sales heyday, so you have to figure out what the new business model looks like as a creator. You have to figure out what your unique constellation of revenue streams are because it's not just going to be Walmart or Target is going to cut me the check from selling CDs.…

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