Evidence receipt / evaluation
Published · transcript-backedBen Thompson: evaluation
12 Feb 2026 Cheeky Pint Ben Thompson from Stratechery on AI ads, the end of SaaS, and the future of media
“What actually matters, and this is a key thing, people get hung up on relative numbers, what matters is absolute numbers.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Ben Thompson
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- evaluation
- Recorded
- 12 Feb 2026
- Publisher
- Cheeky Pint
Transcript context
…It was actually user-generated content. The actual answer is what TikTok did, which is that TikTok's not a social network at all. It is a harvesting and YouTube, the same sort of idea. What actually matters, and this is a key thing, people get hung up on relative numbers, what matters is absolute numbers. So it is better to have 0.1% of your content is good if your content is in the billions or trillions, as opposed to, “Oh, 10% of our content is good,” but you only have a hundred pieces of content, that's actually worse, even if you have a better hit rate. And so spurring lots of creation, writing the algorithms to capture the good stuff, put it up there, that actually solves the Paul Krugman fax machine problem. And Facebook was blindsided by that. They were so stuck on their identity of being a social network that they let TikTok take this huge chunk and it was their blind spot. Speaking of TikTok, I feel like you don't write about ByteDance that much. And I'm curious just what your thoughts are on ByteDance from here and the TikTok sale and everything.…
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