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Amazon sold close to $40bn of advertising last year - bigger than Prime, bigger than the entire global newspaper industry and probably more profitable than AWS. But is this really advertising, rent, or something else? And what does that mean for Google?
over a year ago

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More from Essays - Benedict Evans

What kind of disruption?

Software ate the world. Uber and Airbnb didn’t sell software - they disrupted and redefined markets. But what kind of disruption are we talking about ?

2 weeks ago 12 votes
Apple innovation and execution

It matters that Apple’s new Siri will be late, and it matters more that Apple didn’t realise. Is it more than that?

2 weeks ago 15 votes
The Deep Research problem

OpenAI’s Deep Research is built for me, and I can’t use it. It’s another amazing demo, until it breaks. But it breaks in really interesting ways.

a month ago 25 votes
Are better models better?

Every week there’s a better AI model that gives better answers. But a lot of questions don’t have better answers, only ‘right’ answers, and these models can’t do that. So what does ‘better’ mean, how do we manage these things, and should we change what we expect from computers?

2 months ago 43 votes
Competing in search

A quarter century after 'don't be evil', a judge has found that Google is abusing its monopoly in search. But no-one knows what happens next, and whether this ruling will change anything. Will Apple build a search engine? Will ChatGPT change search? Does it matter?

7 months ago 84 votes

More in startups

The U.S. Led the World in Science and Technology and Just Gave It Up

Prior to WWII the U.S was a distant second in science and engineering. By the time the war was over, U.S. science and engineering had blown past the British, and led the world for 85 years. With the cutbacks of U.S. government support and the Chinese investing heavily for the last three decades to surpass […]

2 hours ago 2 votes
Tariffs: Another American act of intentional self-harm

As Adam Smith said, "there is a great deal of ruin in a nation."

8 hours ago 1 votes
After U.S. failure, Vietnam’s EV leader turns to markets dominated by Tesla and BYD

VinFast follows its Vietnam playbook in Asia and targets the luxury market in the Gulf.

yesterday 2 votes
If you're in Tokyo, come join my hanami this Saturday!

Not an actual blog post, just an invitation.

2 days ago 2 votes
This is how China skirts U.S. chip bans

Chinese tech companies use smugglers, loopholes, and innovation to work around U.S. chip restrictions

2 days ago 3 votes