On 11th of March Amazon put a halt to almost all of its spending on Google Ads.
“Amazon seems to have completely removed itself from the competition for essential goods, effectively leaving one million daily visits on the table for other competitors to take.”
Paid search traffic to the site fell 90% almost immediately costing 11.2m visits.
Ebay has capitalised to a certain extent on this by bidding on high volume keywords – you guessed it – “toilet paper”, “n95 mask” and “hand sanitizer”.
Blaming ratings agencies doesn’t exactly fill anyone with confidence.
Softbank put out this statement asking for Moody’s to withdraw rating due to “excessively pessimistic assumptions regarding the market environment and misunderstanding and speculation that SBG will quickly liquidate assets without any thorough consideration and without making improvements to its financial condition“
Really amazing presentation from Ben Evans and arguably rivals this.
This chart shows for example shows a huge untapped potential for Amazon.
Other amazing stat – Netflix spends more on content than all of UK, Spain, France, Italy and Germany. Bad as it goes direct and doesn’t distribute via others.
FDA approves the first portable Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine.
“According to Connecticut-based Hyperfine, their machine will cost $50,000, which is 20-times cheaper than traditional systems, runs on 35-times less power and weighs 10 times less than normal 1.5T MRI machines.“
“We are a creativity organisation, not a technology organisation.”
“The real test is 15 to 20 years from now, when the dust is settled and we look backwards. Then how are we doing?” Teller says. Until then, there will always be more crazy ideas worth chasing. “The world’s got more than enough problems, sadly.”
This is a chart of the top app downloads in US. Check out Disney.
“The launch of Disney+ in mid-November was unprecedented in the U.S. Its 31 million downloads in Q4 2019 was more than double the total for the next closest app, TikTok.”
It was still top despite launching Nov 12 – some way into the quarter.
Source: Sensor Tower (lots of good app stats inside report).
“The rise of AirPods, smart speakers, and other wearable devices may not signal the onset of a true platform shift, but it undoubtedly represents a transformational evolution in the way we will consume media — and this emerging paradigm of distributed, “eyes up” device interaction directly benefits audio more than other content categories.“
An interesting perspective on how to invest in winners.
“There is a lot of advice about how to be a good startup founder. But there isn’t very much about how to be a good startup investor. Before going any further, I should point out that this is a particularly hard time to invest in startups—it’s easier right now to be a capital-taker than a capital-giver.”
