Craigslist, the world’s largest classified ads platform, was rolled out in a staggered fashion from 1995 to 2009.
This created the perfect testing ground for its impact on 1,500 US daily newspapers.
Researchers found that:
As one would expect local newspapers reduced staff by 6% (14% for those that relied more heavily on classified ads).
There was also a sharp decline in circulation which isn’t made up by other sources of news consumption.
Most fascinating though, there was a significant decline in political content of newspapers (see chart) while things like sport, entertainment and crime didn’t change.
This has very stark implications discussed in the link.
There are 487m music streaming subscribers globally at Q1 2021.
Emerging markets are now central to this market accounting for 60% of all 2020 subscriber growth.
Spotify is still the leader with 32% but has lost two points of market share since Q1 2020.
Google’s Youtube Music has been the standout story – “The early signs are that YouTube Music is becoming to Gen Z what Spotify was to Millennials half a decade ago.“
A really great and rare podcast with the legendary investor.
His points on how to frame buy and sell decisions are particularly good.
As is his view of the UK needing capital to unlock the world-class IP historically generated there and give people ambition to build global platforms instead of solving individual problems.
Finally, his advice to young people about enthusiasm really rings true.
This was a good summary of other points by a former colleague, but the full thing is absolutely worth your time.
The US government estimate of fleet maintenance costs found that battery-electric vehicles (BEV) have about 40% lower cost when compared to internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEV).
Hybrids (HEV) and plug-in hybrids (PHEV) also save money.
NB this 4c per mile difference across the nearly 2 billion miles federal government vehicles covered in 2019 equates to $78 million a year in savings, and that doesn’t account for fuel costs.
FTC has voted unanimously to enforce laws around Right to repair.
There is a big movement towards this – supported by Biden’s broad executive order – to put the power to repair everything from electronics to tractors to cars back in the hands of consumers.
This could be a big issue across the board for companies like Deere, Apple etc. who all make high margins on after market servicing and repairs of their original products.
The full FTC report on the matter is worth a flick.
“We analyzed over 2,600 seed-stage startup investments made on AngelList dating back to 2013 to determine the likelihood of any startup achieving unicorn status today.“
The answer – 1 in 40 shot or 2.5%.
A 2018 study put that number at slightly more than 1%.
One reason for the increase is the pictured chart – “The first quarter of 2021 was the “best quarter ever” for early-stage startups in terms of rates of markups and positive exits. Just over 85% of the events reported by startups on AngelList during that period were positive ones—an increase of 5% from just one quarter before.“
