Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…I don't know. I guess the only thing that I’m not smart enough to opine, although I think back to our episode on BAMTech, which was really fun to dig into, these companies, the Apples, the Amazons, the Facebooks, they’re a little bit playing a different game now that they’re so big. They are so big they have so much money and I think a little bit they’re playing defense versus offense. That’s something we’ve talked about on the show. Like, defense in that like they want to keep people, they need to keep people on their properties. That’s how the merry-go-round keeps spinning and by going out and buying these super expensive manufactured content, I think the hope is that that will attract and keep people on the platform. That will attract people or retain people on the platform and then they’ll stick around for all the stuff they’re not making which is making the wheel-ground. But if they move to a paradigm where they’re paying for all the content on their platforms like that’s a worst business. I think there’s like a tick-tock thing here where first, everybody is free and open about their content being aggregated because, I mean, if you just look at what Disney was doing for the longest time, they’re like, “well, we create content and it needs to be viewed everywhere because we’re horizontal. ” So then they spend 5 to 10 years executing that strategy and then suddenly the world starts to change and people start locking up their content vertically integrating and then you're like, “well, okay, now we need to change our whole strategy” and own every dollar that comes from serving our content. It's the aggregators that lose out in that world where the content starts getting locked up and so when you see an Apple or a Netflix or any of these, Netflix so much more so because they started as a pure aggregator. You need to make your own stuff because if everything is living in silos you got to have a good silo. The history repeating itself lesson is that Yahoo, this is going back to our previous episode we did together, Yahoo and the portals wanted to keep everybody on their pages. Google found a way to make money by being like “No, leave our page. That’s fine. We’ll still make money off you.” So the question actually is, is that a dead paradigm? Is the open web a dead paradigm? Because if it is, then it’s all walled gardens all the way down from here on out.…

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