Ben Thompson: evaluation

Transcript context

…Isn't that bit of the challenge of banner blindness where Instagram advertising works so well because it's a picture feed and it's showing you pictures. And then some of the pictures are like commercials. Whereas with an AI app, you're looking for an answer and you don't want to look at the banner. No, it's a huge concern. And this is one of the great ironies of Meta/Facebook is the extent to which… Of course, Mark and everyone hates Apple for lots of, I think, very justifiable reasons but Apple saved Facebook from itself. Like back in the day, remember Facebook platform and there's like Facebook payments and all this sort of thing and Mark has always wanted to build a platform. And if you're just an app on a phone, you can't build a platform. And the problem is that I think being an advertising-based model is generally incompatible with being a platform. The whole point of a platform is you're letting something else shine, something else to bring to the surface. The support structure for something to take over. So an operating system is not about the… Ideally, it's the application on top of it that you're using. When Facebook was forced to not be a platform, but just be an app, suddenly they could be fully leaning into being an advertising thing. And think about a Facebook ad. Even back in the day when it was a feed ad or a story ad, literally your entire device is all an ad. And somehow it's not a banner, that's a little thing on the edge. They literally have achieved permission from users to take over your entire device to show you a full screen ad every five seconds. It's amazing. And they were forced into it by Apple. Okay this reminds me, and I want to come back to the AI dynamics, but this reminds me of a view I've had that I'm curious for your thoughts on, which is often when tech companies become really big, they become really big just because the core idea works better than even the founders could have realized. And so Meta's a really big company because they have a feed and the feed got really big and they were very smart along the way where they bought Instagram and they're like incredibly targeted—…

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