Recent Writing

March 26 2020Confidence: Low (2/ 7)Themes: decision making under uncertainty, economics, policy, Covid-19

The Cheapest Covid-19 Response is the Most Expensive

A quick, cocktail napkin analysis of the social and economic dislocation of different Covid-19 policies suggests the priority must be to shorten the time needed to end the outbreak.

Read my post on Medium

Singapore may be open for business, but its restaurateurs anxiously contemplate a world without customers.
January 25 2020Confidence: High (6/ 7)Themes: disruption, distribution, cars

The Trouble Competing with Tesla

Consider a world where traditional carmakers can make good electric vehicles. Will making a good EV be enough?

Different failure modes for EV product launches reveal the gaps, whether they can be filled, and, on examination, the different ways that Tesla is disrupting the auto industry.

Read my post on Medium

What happens when car dealers don't want to sell electric cars?
May 20, 2019Confidence: Medium (4 / 7)Themes: Aggregators and Marketplaces, Wholesale transfer pricing, media, content monetization

The Long-term Economics of Podcast Distribution

Why is Facebook better at making money than Netflix and Spotify? Wholesale transfer pricing, content aggregation and some intuition pumps when thinking about podcast distribution.

Read my post on Medium

In content distribution, long-term margins are a function of a) the strength and differentiation of third-party content suppliers, and b) the incremental scale a distributor can bring to those suppliers.
November 14, 2019Confidence: Medium-low (3 / 7)Themes: valuing and monetizing data, the analytics business, smart cities, atoms-to-bits / IoT

Smart Cities are Dumb*.

Smart cities analytics and its tech stack represent only modest commercial opportunities, and are limited by four interlocking factors.

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More data is no guarantee of measurably better governance or more enlightened decisions.
September 29, 2019Confidence: Medium-high (5 / 7)Themes: Social media platforms, content categorization & regulation, monetizing UGC, supply aggregation, adtech, regulating tech

Monetizing Tumblr and the Challenge of Categorizing Content

Tumblr's product was incompatible with a business model like Yahoo's. Decisions baked into how content was organized on Tumblr undermined the value of its ad inventory.

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Context makes it easier to understand whether different types of content are "brand safe," or suitable for advertising. The better social platforms can create contexts, the more effectively they can monetize through advertising.
May 8, 2018Confidence: Part 1: Medium-low (3 / 7); Part 2: Speculative (1 / 7)Themes: Social media platforms, content categorization & regulation, monetizing UGC, supply aggregation, adtech, new businesses, commerce platforms, payments, marketplaces, Facebook

Rumors of Facebook's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated.

Mark Zuckerberg in 2018 announced that Facebook's newsfeed would show more personal content. Investors responded unfavorably, perhaps fearing crimped ad revenues.

1) This might have been a mistaken analysis of the true constraints acting on ads revenue, and

2) there is significant upside to Facebook in new, non-ads-based revenue streams as it experiments with enabling new marketplace models.

Read my post on Medium

Facebook adjusted its newsfeed to reduce the supply of advertising slots (or "ad load"). If Facebook was filling all of its supply, the move's effect on revenue could be partly offset by increased prices. Given its steadily growing share of advertising budgets, Facebook might have avoided a significant reduction in its ability to win share.