TV, merchant media and the unbundling of advertising — Benedict Evans

We’ve seen tectonic shifts in the advertising world: customer acquisition costs for brands are getting prohibitively expensive, forcing brands to consider alternatives to the Google-Facebook duopoly.

For a number of years, media and commerce operated in a mutualistic manner. For a time, sites like Amazon, Target, and Walmart needed product demand and digital publishers would provide that demand for a percentage of each sale made. It was a win / win. Media could monetize its traffic in new ways and brands could advertise without upfront costs.

Tencent, Bilibili, and Kuaishou all rely heavily on “value-added services”—things like micropayments and subscriptions and virtual currencies. More Western companies will turn to VAS, particularly if Apple and Google reduce the 30% tax they take on every digital economy. Already, Discord and Clubhouse have eschewed ads and Facebook, Snap, and Amazo... See more

Meanwhile, Google and Facebook created huge new ad businesses on the internet, that advertisers prefer, and some newspaper companies think that somehow or other they should get some of that money.