Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…The other thing, and this is why just Amazon is so good, and we're going to spend a huge portion of the next episode talking about, it's not just that they make search on Amazon better and play defense against Google. They do that. They also play offense. At first, it was like, oh, we're going to make our own search engine, and that was a bad idea. What is the business model of search? It's advertising. What do they realize? We can build an advertising business with search on Amazon. It's just absolutely brilliant. Any web platform of sufficient scale can layer on for free a second business of advertising, because they just have the traffic and they can put stuff in front of people, and they can prioritize it however they see fit. I think Amazon's ad business—I haven't done the research yet for next episode—I think it's somewhere around $40 billion in revenue now. It is a $30 billion revenue run rate. They don't break out the margins, but it's so jazz.…

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