Why do you say so? They’re burning cash and don’t currently have a viable path to profitability. Sure they have millions of MAU but not many paying ones.
Look at all the companies that have 'burned cash' with no viable path to profitability over the last 20 years. The good ones outlive that criticism, easily. Think Uber, etc. They clearly see a path to profitability and they have plenty of room to experiment here with what works. With new partnerships and dependencies, they won't run out of cash for a long time.
I don’t know the exact numbers, but I feel like OpenAI raised far more money than those companies, burned through it far quicker and has much more competition with a much shakier value proposition.
They definitely have a strong consumer brand so it’s not like they’re going to disappear, but I understand the bear case.
Sam A is pretty well connected and knows the game well. No doubt there will be some risks where the whole thing goes right down to zero, but I personally wouldn't bet against them.
I would not be convinced they outlive the criticism.
I think it's highly likely in the next 10 years companies like Spotify and Uber will no longer exist. They're fundamentally antogonistic to their capital.
Yes, barely, and after cutting revenue per stream to 1/4th of what it was. Many artists make negative money on Spotify, because you have to pay them to put your music on there. And then if Spotify thinks bots are listening to your streams, you have to pay them more.
It's the same problem for Uber. Many Uber drivers make a negative wage. They don't know it, because nobody is going to tell them, but if you do the math, depending on your location, vehicle, and rates, you make a negative wage. Due to gas cost, tolls, maintenance, etc.
The problem here is that the uber drivers and artists are the only thing that makes the platform worth using. Spotify might think their capital is technology. That's because they're stupid. No, their capital is the library of music artists put on there.
If you continue to just antagonize and destroy your own capital that you're using to make money, your business will be blow up.
I think it’s a bit disingenuous to say that Spotify “cut” the revenue per stream. Spotify doesn’t have a fixed revenue per stream, payouts are dynamic and based on how much revenue it made and how many streams there are in total. Also Spotify gives something like 80% of its revenue to the music industry.
It’s essentially a pie that gets divided up amongst all artists by steam count. If your friend’s garage band are angry that they only get 0.001 cents per stream then they should be angry at Spotify listeners for streaming too much Taylor Swift!!!
Furthermore to pay the artists Spotify has to pay the labels and of course they take a giant cut. This trope of Spotify being an evil corporation is unfair
I don't think Spotify is evil, but I do think their business model doesn't make sense.
I mean, it sounds great. Pay 10-15 bucks a month and listen to all the music you want, whenever you want. What an amazing business idea!
But has anyone stepped back and asked if this is actually possible? Because when your artists are getting paid crumbs I don't see how this system continues.
I’ve written about it at some length here, but tldr: their ops are super profitable, likely 1bn per month net income right now. Their R&D costs are immense. You need to believe a story in which their R&D is a waste and other Competitor’s R&D is not or alternately all R&D in the space is a waste and they somehow are unable to use their capital advantage to maintain their substantial brand lead before you believe they are doomed.
> With an annualized revenue run rate expected to reach about $20 billion by year-end, losses are also mounting inside the $500 billion company, the people said.
There is a time limit for shareholders to make return on that investment and so far their operating costs are astronomical given they don't yet seem to offer any substantial product that can't be without, if anything, they're pushing people further away from AI with the slop their churning out.
From what i understand, and I’m no expert, is that all the smart money Is able to get in on an IPO early on way before retail investors have a chance. By the time the retail investors have a chance it’s too late and usually the stock dips post IPO as the early investors sell.
I read that if/when Google find out that you’re not actually Albanian they’ll immediately band your entire account. So I wouldn’t recommend doing this trick for your main Google account that has your email and Google drive stuff….etc. you likely want to create a burner account just for this.
Also do you connect to the Albanian VPN all the time? That would mean all the websites you connect to now think your in Albania
Google DGAF. And I don’t use their other services. Especially not email.
I use their WireGuard endpoint with the WireGuard app in iOS. I have the WireGuard app icon next to YT and toggle it as I start using and stop using YT. I’ve set mullvad dns to also block ads etc so if I forget to turn the VPN off it’s not a big deal.
I tried selective routing but it’s impossible to figure out the YT IPs. They overlap with GCP infra and a lot of apps block connections from Albania so they break and the VPN has to be toggled.
If someone knows of a list that only includes YT servers I’d love that because wireguard lets you do routing easily if you have CIDR blocks.
The to be honest for me toggling on and off the VPN every time I want to watch YT is just too annoying. I’m happy just watching YT as free in safari with ad block installed.
My favourite part is when it opens a form or something to fill out but if you navigate away from this in-app web view to another app and back (say to get a password) you lose the session. It’s incredibly frustrating
Yeah Gmail does this on Android. Super annoying. You basically have to remember to always click "open in chrome". It's not like it even does anything different because it's already open in chrome, just in a tab that it will throw away at the drop of a hat.
That was my setup until recently. The ads are YT blocked well on iOS but it kept having hiccups on iPadOS. I switched to uBlock in safari and it works well. I wish it showed what is being blocked on each page instead of the little counter in the icon.
I’m not sure. I think we’ll live through a few years of AI slop before human created content becomes very popular again.
I imagine a future where websites (like news outlets or blogs) will have something like a “100% human created” label on it. It will be a mark of pride for them to show off and they’ll attract users because of it
Do you mean their market cap? Sure but that doesn’t equal their profits or cash reserves which are considerably less so NVIDIA couldn’t buy the 230 companies even if I wanted to
That’s a good point, which immediately makes me curious — how many of the smallest sp500 companies could nvidia outright purchase (or obtain a majority stake in)? It’s just a curiosity, not trying to demand an answer. I might look at it tomorrow if I have time
They can not, as Nvidia owns very little of its own stock.
It's the owners of the Nvidia stock who potentially could trade their Nvidia stocks for the other 230 companies stocks. But then they have no Nvidia stocks anymore, on the other hand.
