YouSaid · the spoken record

Mark Bergen

lines on the record: 36
first: 2022-11-03
most recent: 2022-11-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But at the same time, YouTube was once competing with Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney on original programming, and subscriptions. They mostly dropped out. They're like, let these companies bury themselves competing for subscribers. We're just going to continue to dominate heavy business, even after Apple's changes. Like, on IS can remains a pretty successful business in Google's testing for that.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, like ad sales. Absolutely true. And so Web3 or whatever. I think that you can sort of case inside Silicon Valley is like, here's a chance for us to reinvent ourselves. And Google's history, like in the past decade, they've been just trying to find a business that's not reliant on ads. Cloud computing is the main one. YouTube has subscriptions. There's YouTube TV. There's comment. They've been always searching for ways. to move past this in part for all the reasons we talked about in part because they don't love it”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The founders have notoriously never loved advertising as a business model. It has clearly been successful for them. Like they will make a discrepancy. A lot of them will be like search ads is search ads, you're delivering a thing that you really want. And the rest of the ads is kind of icky. And there's a sense, it's this weird irony in the fact that they're the biggest online advertising company and yet a lot of people that work there like don't love this. It's kind of sleazy. People in marketing know this, right?”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not confirmed by Serge Abram in my reporting, Sergei Brandon is a founder of Google worth, how much is Sergey worth? One of the world's wealthiest men, largely based on a search advertising business, made a joke about how the YouTube ads were like, he interrupted the speech being like, ha ha, like YouTube ads are interruptive, disruptive, and we 95.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The possibility of Web3, notwithstanding the criticism of the Andreasens of the world, is look at this economy we built around online advertising is not the world we want. And I'll share an anecdote from the book, which is YouTube started a decade ago, YouTube was not making money. It was unprofitable. And they were trying to, after the financial crisis, they're like, okay, we need to make money from this thing. And there was an ads manager who gave a presentation on stage about how they were going to do it. And Sergei Brenn, who this is.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, with Apple's changes, higher ad rates online. So they're moving towards, and you can, if you watch enough YouTube, you're like, a lot of them have sponsored content deals, right? Or they're just like trying to sell their merch and their merchandise tabs and they're looking at the channel. I think they're experimenting TikTok is also moving in commerce. That is a direct response to Apple and to privacy regulation cutting out carving out the profitability of online ads.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Google and YouTube and the rest of social media is commerce, like pushing commerce pretty aggressively. And this looks like, I think, more ways to purchase directly, buy something directly on Instagram, for instance, buy something directly in a YouTube video. I think they're running into the uncanny valley of how much do you want social media to look like the home shopping network. But YouTube, and part of the reason I wrote this book is really fascinating. Like they built up the millions. There are about 2 million, over 2 million creators that make money on YouTube that number is actually down from when the company had to make it a little bit harder. But that's a lot of, that's a whole economy. So many of them are now comfortable because of it's been harder, increasingly harder to make money and then to make.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Mark Zuckerberg's bet is that we're going to stick a phone in our face. And he's going to own that, right? And like, so that's there. They've renamed the company, Meta, like Facebook's existential crisis has always been that Google and Apple own the operating systems where they make the most of their money. And so the move in the metaverse is Facebook Why are we even recording”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Google has. I got a pixel, go pixel in front of me, in part because it was a company I cover. And Google Pixel was a response because Google has Android, the open source software model, they give away their software for free to Samsung and like a galaxy of pun intended, a galaxy of handset makers. And that they like for a long time Google was like, okay, these will be rivals to Apple and it hasn't really happened and Apple, like I said, has just premium people spend more money on iPhones. And then I think Google saw in part they're investing in Pixel because they saw this world Like, oh, our digital advertising model is not going to last for a long time. We need to own and operate the actual hardware. We reported on this quite a bit. Facebook has tried several times.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, like you want to promote, I don't know, like you're searching for Uber and Lyft's like, I want to spend money to be up the top result when you search for Uber. And then people are going to click on Lyft.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, there is Siri, which is an Apple search engine in some ways, right? There's the App Store, which I think that's where the expect you look at the tea leaves on where they're hiring and putting resources, it is to run effectively like a search advertising business in the app.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This has been like YouTube's argument for over a decade now is compared to television, there are so many more people and so many more hours spent on YouTube and that the amount of money marketing dollars spent on television is not proportionate if you want to challenge and there have been some challenger brands in CPG, right? The real smart challenger brands will like be where the kids are. And we'll be getting in front of the audience on digital and do sponsored content deals and can lean into digital advertising. That's effectively works, right? Like these companies have grown because that argument has worked and money is moving over from TV to the internet.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, like PNG level, they basically operate as big and they have all these ad agencies that effectively operate as consultancies and like. Are looking at spread like they're running ads with spreadsheets and algorithms and moving the numbers around. And so, yes I think that is somewhat compelling the fact that they are probably going to continue to, like they know, the argument that Facebook and Google will make, despite these changes around we lose some of our targeting and richness, the audience is still here.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm faced with part of the success of Facebook and Google has been the long tail, like the mom and pop advertisers. Facebook has leaned into this a lot as Response to Google as well. They're going to Amy Klobachar's office and Congress and saying, like, why are you trying to hurt small businesses? Right. And like that might be a compelling argument. Certainly it has political.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They've had more Apple certainly had more pressure around the App Store and the accusation that they're running on like an App Store monopoly and that if you own an iPhone, you're basically like Apple is the gatekeeper. And I think this digital advertising, there's certainly companies in the advertising space that complain about that. Like Apple's one movement from Cupertino has single-handedly has huge ripple effects for this multi-billion dollar digital advertising world. I think that as far as I understand, Apple has faced some in Congress and the EPIC lawsuit, the creators of Fortnite assued Apple, also sued Google, but they've really gone after Apple about this is about in-store app fees for Fortnite games. I think that for Google's case, the most likely outcome from an antitrust might be to kneecap some of their ad tech and the way their digital advertising works.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, Facebook is chea Facebook's business is primarily mobile advertising and iPhones, there was in the new stat, I think recently, that they're now, they've just leapfrogged Android in the US. It's the most popular system. Apple has historically been Apple phones just to make a lot more money per user than Android phones do. And so we can assume that Facebook makes a lot more money on iPhones than on Android. And so that is the bulk of their business. And I think it's, you could say like a significant impact.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Facebook put a remount on there actually, and I don't have it off the top of my head. I mean, their market cap has taken a huge hit. And some of it is regulation, but have they really been regulated yet? Like, it's just kind of just the specter of regulation. Congress hasn't gone after. The only real big tech regulation I talk about in the book is FTC, went after YouTube for illegally targeting kids with collecting data on children under 13. And that's another area where there's this whole online academy that's been unregulated and you're not allowed to collect data on children under 13. You got a lot of companies have done that. We don't know the numbers for YouTube in part because they don't share their financial data. But what was Meta's drop valuation drop in the past? I don't know.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is Apple's changes have made it much more difficult to do that. And so there have to be more reliant on brand advertising, the sort of contextual, just old. But just to be clear, do we know?”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, the dollars, I think some of this was, you know, the other fact, like macroeconomic factors for marketing war in Ukraine, and then there's just the pandemic in general. But in part, if you're an advertiser and your choices are between, say, like television or billboard ad and Facebook, the argument for online has always been like there's a joke about TV. You put your ad up there and you have no idea who's watching necessarily. And that's just sort of like brand advertising, right? And in the industry, there's brand and there's direct response. And the direct response ads are the one where you want people to make an immediate action. You want them to install an app, buy a thing.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in part, that was just about a financial concern. Like, they wanted to give more data to the ad tech industry. It was just a bigger growth. But for a long time, at least they said, and people I've talked in the early days, like had this one was a religious belief that your searches, I mean, you know, Google has our most intimate data, right? Like the things we're searching for. We tell Google things that we wouldn't tell our spouses. And so that search data is incredibly valuable to a marketer if they're trying selling pharmaceuticals or lawyers are the industries that typically have incredibly high search ads because they're people that are really in demand for a particular thing. Instagram is, I mean, Facebook has, you know, it's so funny people talk about how crappy the ad qualities are and yet they're as business certainly has been suffering because of Apple's changes, but it's still that, right? But the”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My husband and I did. Or not having a baby, but just as an experiment to. I mean, Google for a long time tried to keep, they had a state and church and state separation from search and the rest of the display internet that started changing in 2015.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's one way that companies have got around it. The big push also that all the platforms, you see a bunch of ad tech companies have pivoted towards commerce, e-commerce, especially during the pandemic.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of your activity, they're building exactly. They both have different jargony names for the services, but effectively that's it. Like, oh, we're going to put you in a group of people. I'm going to keep going back to this golf example. We're going to put you in a group of, we don't know that you, Joe, are actually visiting this, but we know that there's enough golf fans doing this activity or using this app. And so we can approximate, I mean, a real issue here is that there's Google and Facebook have been in a duopoly in this world for a very long time. That is the third, the actual challenger now is Amazon, right? Like certainly not a small company. Like Amazon's ads business has grown tremendously in the past few years. And they're less threatened by this because they also, it's all in-house, right? Amazon's business is based on the activity on Amazon properties.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is, I'm not an expert, but Google and Facebook have both sort of invented these machine learning models that can walk in backwards. Kind of like build.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Google has said they're doing the same for Chrome Which is they own the Chrome browser. It is actually this Google has pushed that timeline back several years. I think now it's, they say, 2024. And so the idea, like basically these third party sites that do the tracking will not, you effectively will not be able to know your internet history of like what, you know, if you visit golf.com and then you go to ESPN, ESPN doesn't know that you visit a golf.com, right? ESPN might just seize you as a sports fan. They don't see you as like a golf fanatic.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, some of it is really hard to trace, but if I was an iPhone user and I'm using maybe like a Chrome or even Safari, you're getting a lot of background data. Like there's a lot of ad companies you probably never heard of or serving a cookie on your mobile browsing. Some of it are companies that have invented ways to do deep linking between when you bounce from an app to the web, right? This has always been Google's fear of Apple in some ways is that Apple is only, if you're only experience on an iPhone is just moving from app to app, right? Like that is, you're no longer going through the turnstile of the internet, which is Google. So certainly amount of data about the websites you visited, how long you link, like what you click on, all the sort of signals. It's my understanding is now that they've kind of fully eliminated third-party cookies.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think that to a certain extent, YouTube is a really interesting example in part, they have, they built this very fantastic targeting model where they can show and add to a viewer. You mentioned if you watch a lot of golf channels, right? If you're an advertiser, you're going to probably want to get in front of that. You know, if you're selling golf gear clubs, you want to get in front of that person that's watching a lot of YouTube videos. They have this feature, I'm sure, the skippable ad format, which is a major part of their success was because, you know, if the consumer is actually watching this because they didn't click the skip button, that's worth a lot more money. And if Nike runs an ad that didn't skip, Adidas is going to want to pay more in this automated bidding system. And this is why Google search kind of works really well with scarcity too, where it's like they can drive up the cost per mill or cost per click pretty high in these.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, there are all sorts of open and unsolved questions about the value and precision of online advertising. The classic example is you go and you buy a pair of sneakers and then all you see are ads for the same exact sneakers, like just following you around the internet, right? I just bought these. The world's biggest tech companies that supposedly know a lot about you can't solve that.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the aisle. We were moving towards this world, and certainly before Apple stepped in of incredible, like their geofencing be able to get your cellular data and know your exact location and push alerts. And I mean, this is why it's under so much privacy and antitrust scrutiny is because it became quickly invasive and incredibly unregulated”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I haven't heard of that one. There's certainly like all sorts of middlemen in the industry. And in the era, I'm sure this still happens, but I used to go to all these advertising conferences and, you know, all sorts of ad tech companies that they asked them what they do and you don't really understand where they sit in the stack, right? There's just like all sorts of complexities and their programmatic advertising companies that just do one thing on mobile and there was Bluetooth advertising was a big hot thing where you could actually like serve an ad to a consumer right when they're in front of the Colgate.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it is the world's biggest online video advertising service by far, and in fact, it's a very easy and increasingly automated system where if I'm a marketer, I'm PNG. PNG spends millions of dollars and billions of dollars on marketing. I'm going to go to Google and I'm going to kind of give them a chunk of money effectively, goes through a bunch of ad agencies, and then Google's kind of allocate that based on, oh, we're going to give this to search in front of people whenever they type a keyword. We're going to put this on display to put on the Bloombergs.coms of the world, and we're going to allocate this to video knowing that we can actually reach in this very hyper-targeted way the consumers we want to reach.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it is, I think, remarkably similar to sort of financial markets in its complexity and opacity. There are effectively two-sided markets right there, the buy side and a sell side where you have publishers that are out there have a lot of online real estate and that's everything from Bloomberg.com in the New York Times to very popular mobile apps and Snapchat, Twitter, right? Twitter has real estate and then there are a bunch of marketers that want to get in front of consumers. Google has the machinery on both sides. Like they own both sides of the market. And Google is the world's biggest digital advertising company. They have been for decades now the sort of primary way that online publishers have monetized is with Google AdSense. That basically AdSense is the same exact model on YouTube just taken over to video.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think Google's a really interesting test case. It has this frenemy relationship with Apple. They are competitors certainly in obviously. The chief reason why Facebook, Meta, has been griping very publicly about what Apple's been doing and you haven't heard a peep from Google. And in part because their search business is less affected. Like search business, search ads in general are less reliant on the kind of third-party cookies. YouTube, however, is heavily reliant on the fact that they want to, like they can serve much better in higher priced ads if they know all the videos that you've watched, all the other websites you've visited, all the sort of granularity that this entire complex machinery of online advertising is built upon.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People in Google and Facebook, less so at Google, but they will gripe privately. Facebook started to do it publicly. Apple is now building out a search advertising business. They're starting to hire more people. This is a really savvy move. They've marketed themselves as the privacy first company. They have restricted online cookies on iPhones and kneecapped a lot of potential digital rivals. I think the one way to look at it is, you know, this is, they are making they are driving this force movement towards less behavioral and targeted advertising, the sort of foundation for the internet economy of the last two decades. The cynical view is that they found a pretty effective way to build out a competing business to Google. Without the world really knowing it.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, I mean, YouTube's business has grown tremendously. And part of it was because they really didn't kind of lock into their commercial success until 2014, 2015. So the only data we have available is beginning in 2017 for their as business. But 2017, that was around 8 billion. Last year, it was close to 29 billion. Pretty phenomenal growth. They just took off their pandemic when the viewership numbers and we're all stuck at home watching their studios, how the studios were shut down. Like YouTube became the default media aesthetic and a lot of kids, a lot of yoga videos, just the hours have just exploded. But the business has been crippled. I think you could make the argument more by Apple's changes than by any regulation thus far. All right.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of a sleeping giant in social media. Someone described it as like this iceberg that no one ever really talks about as much for a variety of reasons. I see YouTube as both the past and now future of social media. And it was the first company to pay online broadcasters and invented the creator economy. And now we're seeing with TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch, you name it, are all moving in this direction. Social media is no longer your friends and family and your acquaintances. It is influencers. It is celebrity. It is a game built around commerce. And this is a world that YouTube very much created.”
2022-11-03 · Odd Lots · Mark Bergen on Apple's Threat to the Online Ad Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source