How Managers Are Breaking The Internet
Better Offline
Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 688 Ratings
🗓️ 24 April 2024
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The growth-at-all-costs management consultant mindset has turned most of the modern internet into a painful and profitable social experiment - and in this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through how these disconnected, growth-hungry personalities have made Google and Meta abdicate any responsibility toward their users and products.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.0 | Guaranteed Human |
| 0:04.0 | Quarzo Media |
| 0:08.0 | Hello and welcome to Better Offline. |
| 0:11.0 | I'm Ed Zittron. |
| 0:16.0 | This episode is the first of a three-part Let's all fine. |
| 0:22.8 | This episode is the first of a three-part series about how the tech industry has been snatched from the hands of people who actually build things, using software and hardware, by a bunch of managers that have little or no interaction with the products they're actually profiting from. |
| 0:40.3 | These same managers also don't appear to do much work. |
| 0:45.9 | And today, I'm going to walk you through exactly how bad things have gotten as a result. |
| 0:52.3 | In early April, Meta revealed, in a motion trying to dismiss an FTC anti-monopoly lawsuit, |
| 0:58.2 | that Instagram made an astonishing $32.4 billion in advertising revenue in 2021. That figure becomes even more shocking when you consider Google's YouTube |
| 1:04.3 | only made $28.8 billion during the same period. I'd argue YouTube is significantly more |
| 1:10.0 | useful. Anyway, Bloomberg reports |
| 1:12.9 | that Instagram made almost 30% of META's entire revenue in the early part of 2022. |
| 1:20.2 | 96% of META's $40.1 billion, fourth quarter, 2023 revenue came from advertising, and it's made over $100 billion a year |
| 1:30.1 | since 2021, a trend that's likely to continue based on the fact that the only thing these platforms |
| 1:35.6 | care about is juicing as much revenue from these apps. Google made $86.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2023, with $48 billion of that coming from Google Search and its related advertising, up 13% from the previous quarter. |
| 1:53.8 | According to Pew Research, in America, 83% of adults use YouTube, 68% of them use Facebook, and 47% of them use Instagram. |
| 2:03.2 | Each platform boasts over 2 billion users, and over the last three years, META and Google have |
| 2:08.7 | made over a half trillion dollars in revenue from these platforms. |
| 2:13.8 | I now want you to go to Facebook, I want you to scroll down, and I want you to see how quickly you hit an advertisement or a sponsored content thing. |
| 2:25.3 | In my case, after a single post from a friend, I was immediately hit with a suggestion for me to join a group for adult Bluey fans. |
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