This week’s podcast is about Threads (Meta Facebook) vs. X (Twitter).

You can listen to this podcast here, which has the slides and graphics mentioned. Also available at iTunes and Google Podcasts.

Here is the link to the TechMoat Consulting.

Here is the link to our Tech Tours.

Here is my standard strategy graphic.

Here is a typical audience builder platform.

Here are the Digital Marathons (SMILE).

Here are the Competitive Fortresses.

——

Related articles:

• GenAI Playbook (Step 3): How to Build Barriers to Entry with Intelligence Capabilities (9 of 10) (Tech Strategy)
• AutoGPT: The Rise of Digital Agents and Non-Human Platforms & Business Models (Tech Strategy – Podcast 163)
• Why ChatGPT and Generative AI Are a Mortal Threat to Disney, Netflix and Most Hollywood Studios (Tech Strategy – Podcast 150)

From the Concept Library, concepts for this article are:

• SMILE Marathon: Sustained Innovation
• Complementary Platforms
• Audience Builder Platforms

From the Company Library, companies for this article are:

• X (Twitter)
• Threads (Facebook Meta)

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

———transcription below

Episode 233 – Threads.1

Jeffrey Towson: [00:00:00] Welcome, welcome everybody. My name is Jeff Towson and this is the Tech Strategy Podcast from TechMoat Consulting. And the topic for today, Why Threads Might Beat Twitter After All. Now about a year and a half ago I did a podcast which was titled, Why Threads Will Beat Twitter. And threads is the basic Facebook’s copy of Twitter.

I’m not going to say X. I don’t really like the name X at all. Twitter is better. Anyways, that was my prediction and I laid out a strategy argument for that and then threads cratered pretty spectacularly. And I really had some big takeaways from that. Ooh, I got this wrong. I really got that one wrong.

And that was interesting. Threads is coming back. It’s been very interesting the last three to four months going on what’s going on. And I think I might be right after all. So [00:01:00] that’s going to be the point of this podcast. I’ll lay out what I think’s going on. It’s a really good strategy question overall.

Anyways, that will be the topic for today. And let’s see, standard disclaimer here, nothing in this podcast, my writing or website is investment advice. The numbers and information for me and any guests may be incorrect. The views and opinions expressed may no longer be relevant or accurate. Overall, investing is risky.

This is not investment, legal or tax advice. Do your own research. If you ever wonder why I say that so fast is because I’m trying to do it in one breath. So, near the end of that, I’m going as fast as I can. That was actually one breath. Anyways. Okay, let’s get into the content. Okay. Three concepts for today.

These are basically the same ones as my previous podcast. That podcast was 171, if you’re curious. But three ideas. Audience Builder Platform. Now, YouTube, TikTok, [00:02:00] Instagram, Twitter, Threads, Reels. These are all audience builder platforms. So is Spotify. It’s a great business model. I consider it a subset of what we’d call an innovation platform, but you’re basically connecting content creators with content viewers.

Very interesting business model type. You can generalize that to an innovation platform. We could be talking about people who write software, which is a type of creation, connecting them with users. When we’re specifically talking about creating media, content and then building an audience for that subgroup of an innovation platform, I call an audience builder, a very powerful business model, global.

The economics can be problematic depending how you’re monetizing. For some, it’s spectacular. For some, it’s problematic. Anyways, that’s what Twitter is, although it’s an interesting version of it. [00:03:00] Reels, which I’m sorry, not reels, threads, not reels, really when it launched a year and a half ago was an exact copy of Twitter.

And this had a lot of politics involved because, Elon Musk don’t one Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook done the other and so on. It was that sort of concept number one, which you can find in the concept library. I find that really helpful as an idea. Number two, we call complimentary platforms and linked businesses.

Now those Who are familiar with my frameworks when we look at sort of the six levels of competition the top of that the top of the pyramid that the highest level I call competitive fortresses. These are the business models that are really hard to beat now an audience builder can be a competitive fortress tick tock.

Instagram YouTube these are global monopolies now not monopolies but [00:04:00] close to it. So, an audience builder platform can be a competitive fortress. There’s four different types of these I list, but another one which is better than that is what I call complimentary platforms and linked businesses.

This is where, if you have two businesses that link to each other and help each other, that is usually more powerful than one. So, NASCAR, one business owns the racetracks and another business owns the NASCAR league, but Same business. So, they link, they help each other. It creates a more formidable business model in terms of competition.

Arguably the most powerful type thus far is not just linking two businesses together. And they have to be related to each other. They can’t just be random different businesses. But the most powerful would be complementary platforms. When, a search engine like Google is linked to YouTube.

Google Those are complimentary platforms. [00:05:00] Facebook has a couple; Instagram is a platform business model. It’s an audience builder. The news feeds on Facebook is another one. Their communication services like WhatsApp. You’ve got three or four powerful businesses all linked together, two of which I consider platforms, two of which I consider services.

Okay, when you have multiple platforms like that, it’s probably about the most powerful business model that exists, in my opinion. One of the reasons I, and I’ll go through why I thought Threads was going to win, is because it was a complementary platform. Threads was linked to Instagram, Threads was linked to Reels, Threads was linked to Facebook Messenger to the Facebook News Feed.

As opposed to Twitter, which was a standalone solitary platform. That was one of the reasons. I’ll go through my argument more. So that’s concept number two, complementary platforms, which is a type of link business. Concept number three smile marathon, [00:06:00] rate of innovation. Um, when you have these sorts of digital marathons, hence all my books are called motes and marathons.

One of the best marathons you can run is what we call an innovation marathon. And in certain types of businesses that can be, for those of you who haven’t read these books, the idea is business models are structural. It’s comparing a plane versus a bicycle. It’s just a different machine. But when we look at operating activities, even within the same type of machine, sometimes you can build a sustainable advantage versus a rival.

And when that happens, it’s usually because you are running ahead of them in a key operating dimension over time, and you pull far ahead of them. We call that a marathon. One of those is, Elon Musk and his rockets. He is running an innovation marathon. It’s not that other people can’t build rockets.

[00:07:00] It’s not that he has a structural advantage or a business model that has a different advantage. It’s that he’s been innovating so consistently day after day for, what is it, 15, 20 years now. He’s just way ahead of you in this marathon. He’s disappeared over the hill. So now if he screws up, you could catch him.

But sometimes when you run one of these marathons, you can pull far ahead of your competitors. But it has to be in a key operating dimension that matters. You can’t be better at your competitors than human resources. That doesn’t, you don’t win with that. But when you’re making rockets, running an innovation marathon and pulling way ahead of everyone else in the marathon.

Yeah, for all effective purposes that shows up as a competitive advantage. Rate of innovation and the argument I’m going to give you basically is like, look, Twitter and Elon are better at the innovation marathon [00:08:00] than Zuck and Facebook. He’s just the best at that. But. Facebook, Zuck, Threads, they have a more powerful business model.

So, the complimentary platform versus the rate of innovation. That’s the dynamic. And my prediction a year and a half ago was the business model will win ultimately. Okay. Those are the three concepts for today. And they are always in the concept library on the jefftowson.com. All right. Let me go through the argument here.

First of all, let me tell you what’s happened now. About a week ago I was just looking at something on, I saw some tweet was probably by Elon Musk or something about how X Twitter is like the top news app in the world. And I thought that was interesting. So, I opened up the apps on my phone and I checked the news and the top, not just the news app, but the top free app.

And I [00:09:00] opened up. My sort of rankings in the apps in my iPhone to see are they number one or not. And they were doing well, but what got my attention is in the top three to four free apps on the iPhone was threads that, that would, that’s strange. I haven’t thought about threads in a year.

I thought they died. Turns out they haven’t died in fact; it turns out they’re coming back strong right now. What happened, and that’s how I started looking into this. What happened about, July 2023, that’s about when Threads launched. And it got a lot of hype. It got a lot of press because obviously it was a big deal.

And there’s a lot of politics in this, obviously. When they launched July 2023, they got registered users. These numbers, you got to take them with a grain of salt. 80, 100 million. Okay. Now register users don’t [00:10:00] necessarily mean that much. But then within a couple of days, about a week, they had about 40 million daily active users.

This is July 2023. And it, oh, that was interesting. Wow. They’re coming back strong, this new thing. And then that’s about the time I did my podcast saying, I think they might win. And then it dropped pretty precipitously like within weeks. It cratered. Daily active users dropped to about 13 million by the end of July, so it was a peak and a fall, and that’s when I really started to think about, huh, how did I get this so wrong?

For those of you who have been following me for a long, for a while, I like to give analogies. I like to say there’s a couple places you have to win with a good strategy. You have to win in terms of building a moat. So, you have to win in terms of operating activity and you have to win in terms of your product.

And I give, people as symbols. So, the symbol of winning for a moat is Elon, I’m [00:11:00] sorry, Warren Buffett. The symbol for winning as an operating entity is Elon Musk. And the symbol for winning as a good product market fit, customer acquisition was Steve Jobs. I didn’t really have the Steve Jobs in that model until after this Threads thing.

And I realized I was overemphasizing operating activities and strategy. And I was under Sort of waiting how important product strength was so I really changed my sort of framework after this because I got it wrong Okay, that was what happened. I didn’t think about it. I you know, so what’s happened since Basically threads as far as I can tell has started to be actively promoted to Facebook users Now keep in mind Facebook’s got about 3 billion users and their daily active users is insane December 2023 [00:12:00] Threads start showing up again in the top downloaded apps.

February 2024, so eight or nine months after launch, about 10 months ago, the monthly active users on Threads, according to Mark Zuckerberg, was 130 million. Third party trackers say it was 150, but either way, this thing was coming back. And it’s You know, actually one of the reasons I thought this was going to do well, probably the biggest reason was I thought you could cross sell this thing with your other services and drive users to this, which is how they got reels to be successful, which it is now.

So, February 2024, 130 million monthly active users. Okay, that’s not, Facebook, I’m sorry, Twitter at that time, 300 to 400 monthly active users. Today. Depending which numbers you believe, Twitter’s [00:13:00] about 500 to 600 monthly active users. Okay, smaller, but definitely not dead. Then something’s interesting happened the last couple months.

And this is when, it got my attention, because I looked in my phone, and I’m like, how is Threads in the top three downloads? In December, November 2024, reports are, monthly active users on Threads, 270 million. So, they have gained Somewhere on the order of 75 to 100 million new monthly active users between August and December.

That’s really interesting. Something’s going on. Now, these reported numbers, you have to take them with a massive grain of salt. But, okay, let’s say 200 to 300 million monthly active users on threads, 500 to 600 on [00:14:00] However, Third quarter of 2024 daily active users on Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger three billion.

So, they have a lot of other people they can push this to. So anyway, something interesting is happening. And if I still had to bet, I’m coming back to the idea that maybe I think I was right before. And I’ll give you the argument. So that’s interesting. I’ll give you a sort of how I view the business model and what I think matters.

Now, my argument before, it’s about 70 percent of my argument. Now, my argument before was, I guess I have three points. Number one was what I’ve already said. Look, I think Threads has a dramatically more powerful business model, ultimately, for effectively the [00:15:00] same product. There’s not a big difference between these two things.

There’s some degree of differentiation, which I’ll talk about. Okay. And why, for the reason I said, linked business models are more powerful than standalone business models and platform business models that are complimentary and linked are even more powerful because digital users are easier to transfer.

If you have two platform business models, it is very easy to sign up other people. You can just transfer their accounts from one app to the other directly. If you’re on TikTok, TikTok’s worried about getting shut down in the US. You can go into Lemon8, which is another ByteDance app, and you can literally just press a button and transfer your TikTok account in there.

So, it’s a lot easier to Push users from platform to platform when it’s a digital good You can also share the data, which is very valuable when you’re talking about algorithms and other things [00:16:00] There’s multiple network effects Usually each platform has its own network effect customer acquisition is dramatically cheaper and easier You can bundle services often Alibaba does this a lot.

If you’re doing the same idea, complimentary platforms in e commerce, not in media, let’s say you’re Alibaba and you have a services marketplace, which is a type of platform for hotels, which they do. Not only can you pair that with their other e commerce platform, their marketplace Taobao, but you can bundle those services together.

So, you can. Buy makeup on Taobao and have a makeup artist come to your house and put it on before your big party. So, you can do lots of various bundling at the product level and even you can bundle across. You have a membership for all the Alibaba products where [00:17:00] you get, basically everything you need like Amazon Prime is basically the same idea.

All of this complimentary linked business model stuff becomes much more powerful when you’re talking about digital services. The other thing you can do subsidies. Now why do we like platform business models? Because you can shift the pricing between the different user groups. You can charge merchants.

Or you can charge advertisers and you can give it to the consumers for free or at a subsidized price. If you’ve got multiple platforms, you can do subsidies all over the place. You can discount hotels and shift it over to advertisers or shift it to the Taobao merchants or whatever you want. So, there’s this whole game of, generally the more user groups you have in an ecosystem, the more dimensions of freedom you have that you can basically use as a weapon against your competitors.

My standard joke for years [00:18:00] has been, the ecosystem, the digital conglomerate, the platform business model, the one that has more user groups usually beats the one with fewer user groups. And finally, if you have complimentary platforms, you get economies of scale in your major fixed costs, which are usually technology spending, R& D, and marketing.

All of that works for you. It’s pretty fantastic. And then, of course, you have network effects. Now, that’s the business model thinking. But you also want to think about operating tactics. Thanks. Okay, what can you use as a tactic? If you’re a big company like Facebook, you can just pay content creators more, and they will come on to your audience builder platform and you give them bigger payouts.

Facebook can run threads at a loss until the [00:19:00] end of time. And they can just pay their content creators tons, and the content creators will come over, usually. They got a lot of capital. Threads doesn’t have that. Now, Elon Musk has a ton of capital, so the ability to use this as a weapon is limited, because he can raise endless capital.

So, you don’t really want to get in a spending war with him. But generally, a complimentary platform will beat a standalone platform, because they will outspend them. That’s pretty much it. And ultimately, I think the question is, which I’ll get at is this a commodity or is it a differentiated service?

The reason for the most countries only had one phone network like AT& T in the U. S. for almost, 70 years is because you had a very powerful platform, a network effects. And it was a commodity. It was a utility. If a new player came in [00:20:00] and was smaller, there was no way they could differentiate to make people use them instead of or in addition to the main because making a phone call is just making a phone call.

This is why WhatsApp is so hard to compete with because it’s a utility. There’s no space to differentiate. audience builder platforms, there is room to differentiate. I’ll talk about that in a second. So that’s an interesting aspect. All right. So that was conclusion number one, which was look threads, just has a much stronger business model.

Full stop. Conclusion number two, X is much, much better at innovation. And it turns out that is a competitive dimension against which you can run a marathon and it will matter. It matters in rockets because you innovate in rockets, your rockets are [00:21:00] better, you’re cheaper. Yes. And then they, your competitor catches you and they can make a rocket as good as you now, but you’re already three years ahead with a better rocket.

Okay. Audience builder platforms. are the same. Not in the U. S. For the most part. YouTube is pretty much the same. It’s been for 10 years. Twitter hadn’t innovated or added anything in a decade. But when you go to Asia, you go to China, these platforms innovate like crazy. It’s really interesting.

So, we chat many programs. WeChat, short videos, live streaming, ByteDance is doing stuff all the time. I did an article about Bilibili a couple days ago. There’s a lot of these platforms that are audience builders that are constantly innovating and changing. It’s a very dynamic field. U. S. is stagnant, so it’s a little bit different, but [00:22:00] I think where Elon Musk had a real advantage here.

One, he’s a better innovator. That’s what he does. And Twitter wasn’t a mature finished product. It wasn’t like Twitter was, Oh, it’s good. No, it was sucky. It was half broken as an idea for a product. Like the number of people that joined Twitter and left and stopped using it was huge. It was toxic.

It didn’t quite work, and it had existed in this half-broken state for a decade. So, there was an opportunity to improve there that maybe you wouldn’t have had if the product was mature and good. Okay. What did he do? He came in, I wrote a little article shortly after he came in, basically saying, look, this is, I think, the turnaround plan for Twitter.

And it was a turnaround plan. I think I was pretty right on that. I used to do turnaround, so I know the playbook. [00:23:00] It’s pretty standard. It was like four things. Number one, come in and fix the culture and management. Cause it was bad. The management was bad. The culture was bad. They had people everywhere that weren’t doing anything waste.

It looked more I don’t know, like a welfare state than it did a lean and mean company. So, you come in and you do shock therapy for the management and the culture. He fired all the management, but then it was also shock therapy to the culture and just drive everyone out who’s not driven.

Fine. Then to fix the operations and stabilize the finances. Number one, fix, replace the management shock therapy for the culture. Number two, stabilize the finances, fix the operations, try and get this thing to operating break even. So at least you’re not bleeding out. And he did a lot of that.

He fired a bunch of people. He added a subscription [00:24:00] service. He got a, basically an ad attack, a boycott, an orchestrated political attack against his revenue, his advertising revenue, these boycotts, which are, they’re politically orchestrated. He basically got that done. Step three, okay. Now let’s start to fix the product.

We need to 10x the product. We need to make it 10 times better than it is because it sucks. And we need to start growing the revenue. Let’s say 10x the product. And that’s when I think he really showed his team, not him, that they’re very good at this because they started rolling out new features and new ideas at a breakneck pace.

And this is his strength. He can innovate faster than almost anybody. So, if you’re on Twitter, almost every week, there’s something new. They added video. They’ve changed the news feed. They changed the look. Now they’ve got Grok AI in there. They started paying [00:25:00] content creators. They are just moving very quickly.

And as a net result, users have been going up. It looks like it went from maybe 300 million monthly active users to 400 to 500 to 600. So, he’s just steadily innovating, growing users and growing MAU. That would be phase three, that’s ongoing. And then the last one, if you’re really going to 10x the product, there’s only a couple things that can do that.

My argument, which I think is true, is that short video and payment. are the big levers to pull. Once you do short, this is why WeChat went all into short video. Because when ByteDance was doing short video, Alan Zhang, the guy who runs WeChat, he recognized this as a mortal threat. We have to have short video because it’s the most addictive thing in terms of getting attention, pretty much that [00:26:00] we’ve ever seen.

He’s going into video very quickly and then getting payment online, which isn’t there yet because once that happens, people can start to do many programs in commerce and all of that. I think that’s most of the playbook and yeah they’re executing quite well. I think it’s great.

So that was my takeaway, which is Meta has a better business model and Meta is quite good at operations. They don’t innovate very well. They, but they’re pretty good at copying and then just operating month after month and doing well. It reminds me of sort of Apple versus Xiaomi.

Like I would say the same thing, Tim Cook and Apple’s management doesn’t innovate. They don’t create new stuff. They couldn’t make a car, but they operate pretty good. They make the phones and so on, every iPhone is pretty much the same. And I think that’s similar and that’s not good.

In fact, that’s not [00:27:00] unimportant. TikTok came into the U. S. and ran circles around Facebook and ByteDance can out innovate Facebook like it’s nothing. They’re so fast on their feet. Facebook got blindsided. TikTok became huge. 170 million monthly active users in the U.

1. now. Absolutely massive. But, Facebook launched Reels, which they stuck in Instagram, and they’ve been quietly operating since. pretty steadily. If you look at their numbers, I think they’ve basically caught tick talk in the U S now. So yeah, they’re good at that. They copy in there. They’re pretty good operators.

They copied snap. It’s not to be undervalued. The question will be, does their business model, which is more powerful with steady operations, is that enough to beat Twitter and Elon [00:28:00] with their super-fast innovations where they’re always adding new stuff all the time? My prediction is they will overtake them.

I think what we’re going to, what we’re seeing is going to continue. I think they’re going to keep adding a hundred million and someday in the near future. Threads is going to be at par with Twitter. Because keep in mind, they’ve got 3 billion users in their back pocket. They don’t have to shift too many of those over to Threads.

to catch them. They are, they’re a powerhouse. So that’s conclusion number two, which is my main point. But let me make one more point. This will be the last point. I don’t think these audience builder platforms, short message threads, Twitter. I don’t think these are winner take all. I don’t think these are like phone networks.

I think we are seeing increasing differentiation. [00:29:00]

Not like phone networks, not like Slack versus Microsoft, but we can see differentiation at least two ways. Number one, you can see fundamentally different user groups on different platforms. On each of these platforms, Threads versus Twitter, we have three user groups. We have people who consume content and comment and stuff, content creators, and then advertisers.

It is starting to look like different tribes to me. It’s, now if you look at sort of political divide on these, I’m talking about the U. S. here. If you look at political divide in the U. S. on these platforms, Twitter X is the most balanced. They’re about 50 50 red state, blue state, left, something like Reddit is really quite blue, lefty. Blue Sky, they’re more lefty. So, the interest [00:30:00] I’m not sure. Are we seeing differentiation based on political affiliation or not? I’m not convinced that’s actually happening. People say it’s happening. I’m not convinced it is. Twitter actually looks pretty bipartisan, and I suspect threads will be similar.

But we might be seeing just different communities, different habits. More people identify with one more than the other. Even if the overall populations are politically similar, I think there’s a sort of sense of identity that is emerging between these people are, I’m a threads person. I’m a bluesky person.

I’m a Twitter person. Even if it’s not as political as people think there is some degree of shared identity happening. The content creators, not so much. I think they just go wherever the traffic is. Maybe the biggest area of differentiation we’re going to see in terms of user groups will be [00:31:00] advertisers.

And this is the biggest weakness of Twitter, in my opinion, because Facebook is the largest advertising mechanism in human history. Them and Google, they have an endless sea of advertisers. So that would be one way I think these things are going to differentiate almost on a tribal level that is not political.

Now, one, one point here, Facebook, I’m sorry, Threads is growing in user number. It looks like a lot of that is coming from outside the US. So, when you look at these numbers, keep in mind we’re talking global here. X and Twitter have tremendous users in Japan. And they have good users in the U. S. But other places they don’t.

And if they get censored in areas like Brazil, that will hit them pretty hard there. Threads is the same. It looks like a lot of their adoption is coming from out of the U. S. [00:32:00] So you can’t really tie this to U. S. politics too much. The more interesting area of differentiation, and this is my last point, I think comes from the idea that content moderation and algorithms.

are inherently differentiated. I’ve said this before that if you run an audience builder platform, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, any of these Facebook newsfeeds, not the other part. It’s like being editor in chief of a newspaper. Everybody knows that the newspaper New York Times, Boston Globe, LA Times, Bangkok Post, whatever.

The editor in chief is the, I hate to say the mayor, the chief taster. This is the person that decides what news stories go on the top of the fold and which ones go below the fold and which ones don’t show up at all. And sets the rules [00:33:00] for what is important and what is not. And it also sets the rules for behavior.

You can’t swear here. You can’t do pornography here. And in many ways it also sets the tone for what values do we promote. What values do we not accept? The editor in chief of these platforms, it’s like you’re the editor in chief, you’re the mayor of a town, and you’re the pastor of the local church.

You are saying what is news and what is not news and what is a priority and what is not a priority today? That’s editor in chief. You are the mayor of the town. You are saying what behavior is not allowed in our community. You can’t Sell certain things you can’t do pornography. You can’t do scams. You can’t do bots That’s mayor calling the cops and it’s also the pastor that these are the values We believe in and these are the values we don’t tolerate which every church or synagogue has. [00:34:00]

So, when you look at these differentiated platforms, all of that becomes embodied in a person. It really is Elon Musk’s platform. And the values of the platform, the prioritization, the mayor of the town, the pastor, that’s him. And everybody knows that. And for Threads, it’s Mark Zuckerberg. And who knows who’s in, I don’t know who’s in charge of YouTube these days.

The differentiation really comes down to an individual that you identify more with. And that individual’s personality priorities gets played out in the algorithm. So, it’s almost like Twitter is a digitized version of Elon Musk and Threads is a digitized version of Mark Zuckerberg and their organization and that as the algorithm gets better and better, it’s really becoming more popular.

More [00:35:00] like that. I think as the algorithm gets smarter and smarter; I think we are seeing their personalities shaping these platforms more. And I, this is the same for TikTok. I was meeting with them in, in, well ByteDance, based in Beijing or in Singapore. But I was meeting with the ByteDance in Beijing and I said the same thing because TikTok was under fire in the US and I said, you’ve got to get shows Chu the CEO of TikTok, you got to get him out in the media.

They didn’t ask me. I was just talking. One of the biggest problems TikTok is having is it’s a corporate entity and nobody knows who is making these hard decisions. If they trust showed the true They will trust Tik Tok. It has to be personal. You’ve got to get this guy out in the press, send him to Congress, get him out there and let people see him and see if they get comfortable with him.

And if they get comfortable with him, they’ll say, look, I think he’s not a bad guy and he’s probably doing all right. [00:36:00] And if they’re doing necessary adjustments to the algorithm, not allowing gambling, not allowing porn, I trust that this guy is making the, my values match his values. To some degree, I’m comfortable.

I’m more comfortable with Soja Chu and TikTok as the editor in chief than I am with Zuckerberg and Facebook because I’ve never seen TikTok do mass censorship that hurt people, and I can look at what was done on COVID on Facebook, and it’s really, in my opinion, horrific. So, one is a maybe theoretical problem.

One is a problem we’ve actually seen. But anyways, I think the differentiation is going to come down to almost like who the editor is, who’s the person. Anyways, that’s it for this. But yeah, based on all that, I think I think they’ll probably catch them and then I think it will, and I think there’s room for differentiation.

So, I don’t think one is going to be put down. I think they’re both going to [00:37:00] survive and can thrive. But the algorithms, the identity, all of that is going to increasingly reflect the individuals that run them and that make all these basically values based decisions. So that’s what it now, one caveat to everything I just said to cop, there might be some external things that change everything I just said.

One might be that Grok and AI changes the nature of these platforms. Maybe. So that’s a big external factor based on a new technology that’s coming. The other is a political factor that governments are increasingly demanding that these platforms censor to their will. Which was a big deal in Brazil. It’s a big deal in the EU.

It’s a big deal in Australia big deal. UK forget it Canada that was the scenario up until a couple months ago and now that [00:38:00] Elon and Trump are Rising into tremendous political power We may see that shift the other way because the indications are that Trump is going to demand other countries If they want to do business with the U.

1. on good terms, they have to reflect the free speech values that he has. It’s going to go into the trade deals. So, he may force countries like the U. K. to stop their sort of mass censorship and imprisoning people for memes and stuff, which I think is horrific. We’ll see, that’s, we’ll know in a couple months.

Anyway, so the government, the political side, country by country, that’s a big external factor. But that is it. Anyways, I hope that’s helpful, the three concepts for today. Have audience builder platform, very important, complimentary platforms, powerful business model and finally smile marathon in rate of innovation.

Those are the three concepts for today. As for me, I’m in [00:39:00] Northern California with my family. Having a nice time, spending a lot of time with family, catching up with, nieces and nephews and all of that. That’s great. Drinking a lot of eggnog, which is fun. It’s Christmas in a couple of days, so looking forward to that.

It’s cold here, I don’t like that. But business wise, things have really accelerated this month. I’ll talk more about that soon, but for those who have been following the personalization playbook I’ve been outlining over the last several months, that’s moving pretty good. So, I’ll talk about that.

That’s going to be my primary thing for the next several years. Yeah, going well, heading out of here in a week or two back to Asia. I’m going to be in Paris for at least one, maybe two weeks in January for anyone who’s out there or nearby. So, I’ll be floating around Europe for a couple of weeks which.

Again, I keep talking about how cold it is, because I know how cold Paris is in January. It’s absolutely brutal. And I live in [00:40:00] the tropics now, so I’m, yeah, I complain about it constantly. Anyways, that’s my plan. I hope everyone is doing well, I hope this is helpful. Have a great holiday, Merry Christmas, and I guess I’ll talk to you, eh, next week.

Not quite the new year, but after Christmas. Anyways, that’s it. Thanks a lot. Bye bye.

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I write, speak and consult about how to win (and not lose) in digital strategy and transformation.

I am the founder of TechMoat Consulting, a boutique consulting firm that helps retailers, brands, and technology companies exploit digital change to grow faster, innovate better and build digital moats. Get in touch here.

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