The other obvious problem with today’s internet is the economic structure. Chris Anderson wrote a famous essay called “The Long Tail” back in 2004 that predicted the internet would make media businesses less hit-driven and improve the economics for niche creative people. He was right in one sense: the internet created many more niche communities... See more

A few numbers. Online advertising averages 1% of US GDP — roughly $200B out of a $20T economy— important, but not critical. For context the US video game business is about $65B, with about $20B coming from virtual goods. I think with new web3 business models we could easily 10x the virtual goods economy. So I don’t see why replacing advertising... See more

Then there is the ugly side. People tend to be more civil the more intimate the media: video and audio over text, synchronous over asynchronous. They also tend to be more civil in smaller communities with shared interests and values. Twitter takes the least intimate medium — asynchronous short-form text — and smashes together thousands of unrelated... See more

I have mixed feelings about Facebook being the likely winner here. On the one hand, it’s the last founder-run of the big 5 tech companies, and I admire Zuck’s vision and aggression. On the other hand, Facebook has a history of creating closed systems that don’t interoperate, charge high take rates, arbitrarily change rules on developers, and other... See more

The other major kind of advertising is brand advertising. The biggest brand advertisers sell the most generic products like cleaning supplies and processed food. They take commodity products and try to create brand loyalty through emotion-driven advertising. Hence the importance of running repetitive TV and internet ads.

he digital world gets subordinating prefixes like the “e” in email and ecommerce, the physical world is called the “real world,” and so on. You see this in how digital innovations like social media were dismissed as toys for so many years. It’s pretty obvious today that social media is driving global politics, business, and culture — but people... See more

For example, Bloomberg is a company that makes the bulk of its revenue renting computer terminals to banks and hedge funds, and, unsurprisingly, is probably the most negative on crypto. It would be as if Exxon owned a news company that covered clean energy.

First, I believe VR will be a major computing platform, as or more significant than the phone and PC were. Facebook should sell about 10 million Oculus Quests this year. The headset will continue to get smaller, lighter, higher res, more powerful, and with many more and better apps. This will drive exponential growth the same way it did with PCs... See more

Facebook has on the order of 10,000 designers and engineers working on AR/VR. They are making a massive investment, and it appears to be working. The only other plausible contender right now is Apple. There are rumors they have a serious effort, but they are ultra secretive so we don’t really know. Google and Amazon don’t seem to be investing in... See more