Addictive Design Isn’t Market Distortion; Platforms Merely Copy Features
It’s difficult to take the position that “addictive design” is a market distortion issue when social media companies ruthlessly implement each other’s features and time spent is so fungible. https://t.co/qbERq7iNFB
Google's Network Revenue Falls 15th Quarter, YouTube Leads
This is your regular reminder that Google's Network business is vestigial: Network revenue declined for the 15th consecutive quarter in Q1 2026, and the delta between YouTube and Network revenue was nearly $3BN (although the gap shrank from Q4 2025)....
Own LLM Foundation Gives Edge in Ranking Research
1) GEM is a foundation model. The ranking models they use at inference are distilled from GEM. 2) Applying LLMs to ranking is the frontier of RecSys research. Having access to its own foundation LLM, which can then be fine-tuned for...
Meta Q1 2026: 33% Ad Revenue Surge, New MCP Support
Meta Q1 2026 earnings: 33% ad revenue growth, MCP support for ad buying agents https://t.co/50uwbFSTVE
Meta's China Risk Low Despite $21.8B Ad Spend
What is Meta’s China exposure? China has ordered Meta to reverse its Manus acquisition, threatening technology transfers and advertising revenue. It invites an interesting question: what is Meta's exposure to China? Despite an estimated $21.8BN in advertising revenue in the country,...
Half of Meta's $54B APAC Ad Revenue From China
Note that Meta generated $54BN from APAC *advertisers* in 2025, with estimates that Chinese advertisers accounted for roughly half of that. https://t.co/ey2WOGf5WR
OpenAI Nears 1 Billion Weekly Users After Image Model Launch
OpenAI launched its new image model, ChatGPT Images 2.0, a week ago today. Since OpenAI reports WAU for ChatGPT, not MAU, I expect the company to announce this week or next that it has reached 1BN WAU. OpenAI’s last WAU disclosure...
EU's Regulatory Push Risks Own Economic Decline
The risk with the Brussels Effect strategy (“EU as the world’s regulator”) was always that it could catalyze a vicious cycle that suppresses regional GDP per capita and thus the EU’s leverage. Add to it a US administration willing to characterize...
NYT Digital Ads Surge 25% After Video Pivot
Yes, and to add a bit more context: The New York Times Company saw its digital advertising revenue stall -- even decline, as it did by nearly 4% in Q4 2023 -- until it strategically embraced video. In Q4 2025, its...
Privacy Hardliners Overstate Incomprehensibility of Data Disclosures
The “data collection transparency is bad, actually” argument from privacy hardliners is overstated and inconsistent. First, society asks citizens to navigate complex questions as a matter of routine. We can expect a person to understand nutrition labels or traffic laws,...
AI Undermines Pareto, Unlocking Profitable Niche Markets
The Prosperous Society, Part 3: The Collapse of the Pareto Principle In Episode 3, I make the case that artificial intelligence stands to erode the Pareto Principle as it applies to production, as AI-empowered distribution efficiencies will enable firms to reach niche,...
Google's Dan Taylor on AI Mode & Evolving Marketing Measurement
In this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with Google’s Dan Taylor about AI Overviews, AI Mode, the evolution of marketing measurement as platforms like PMax have gained a greater share of spend, Google’s UCP protocol,...
Ruling Allows Link-Out, Not In-App Payments, Violates
This isn’t a valid interpretation of the most recent Epic Games v. Apple ruling and my belief is that CalAI was in violation of App Store policy: - the ruling forces Apple to allow link-out, not alternative payments in in-app webviews -...
Meta's Muse Spark Bridges Consumer Ads to Enterprise AI
Contextualizing Meta’s Muse Spark "Whether this API pilot emerges as a direct enterprise opportunity or not, there’s clear applicability to the Manus agent use case (which has already been brought to Meta’s ads manager), Meta’s off-platform Business AI initiative, and other...
Snap‑Perplexity Deal Valued at 7% of 2025 Sales
Curious indicator for the Snap / Perplexity deal. Perplexity’s $400MM payment to Snap (undisclosed mix of cash / equity) would have represented ~7% of Snap’s 2025 sales. Snap noted in Q4 earnings that the integration had been delayed due to...
Ramp Data Can’t Represent US Business Anthropic Usage
The notion that one third of US businesses pay for Anthropic’s tools is prima facie absurd. Ramp is very obviously not a representative sample of the entirety of the US economy. https://t.co/jV9vAvgLBn
Learn LLMs From Classics, Not Bite‑Size Social Posts
I've seen a lot of explanatory content floating around on X related to LLMs, transformers and attention, techniques like quantization, etc. Much of it seems obviously LLM-generated, and often I spot errors that are disqualifying. I'm not an ML expert by...
90‑second Non‑
A Reddit user is exposed to a 90-second, non-skippable YouTube ad in a 40-minute video on CTV. https://t.co/BukQnrjahx
AI-Driven App Surge Shrinks Organic Discoverability
The App Store discoverability squeeze "If the number of apps available in the App Store explodes through AI-assisted coding agents, yet the surface area for organic visibility remains fixed — or, actually, decreases, given that the second ad placement in search...
Rome Court Orders Netflix to Refund Illegal Price Hikes
A Rome court has ruled that Netflix's price increases in Italy between 2017-2024 were illegal and that it must refund customers and roll back its price adjustments. Customers on the Premium plan continuously from 2017 are entitled to €500 in...
OpenAI’s TBPN Deal Mirrors Standard Sponsorship Practices
It’s easy / tempting to overthink OpenAI’s acquisition of TBPN. But as a brand marketing campaign, it’s not egregious. Oracle has a five-year, $500MM sponsorship deal with F1 racing. Adidas pays Real Madrid $158MM annually for sponsorship placement on its...
Open-Weight LLMs Democratize Recommendation System Capabilities
RecSys and chill "Open-weight models are, by definition, publicly accessible. If the argument made by Meta and Netflix about the value of LLMs is truly that they bring semantic, contextual data to bear on ranking tasks (Meta has called this “world...
Netflix Leverages LLMs to Personalize Artwork Recommendations
LLMs are increasingly being used in RecSys for personalization and ranking tasks, where semantic and contextual knowledge can be brought to bear to rank pieces of candidate content using sequences of a user's behavioral history. Netflix has a new paper out...
Meta's AI Ad Stack Drives 3% Conversion Boost
RecSys, ad ranking, and the AI advertising opportunity Certainly, Meta seems to be investing resources into advanced architectures for ad retrieval, ad ranking, and RecSys more generally. And the results are impressive: a 3% increase in conversions might be interpreted as...
US May Push Tencent Gaming Divestiture Over Privacy Risks
The FT reported earlier this month that the Trump administration is considering forcing Tencent to divest certain gaming assets over security concerns. The notion that gaming assets, particularly mobile gaming assets, could be useful in user-level profiling is not implausible; recall...
Netflix Recruits YouTube Stars to Defend TV Dominance
Netflix’s YouTube opportunity, part 2 But given that the television is now the dominant viewing surface for YouTube in the United States, Netflix has good reason to want to recruit talent like Ms. Rachel and now Danny Go! from the...
AI Turns Commerce Into Personal Expression
The Prosperous Society, Part 2: The Human Nexus of Commerce The Prosperous Society is a podcast series by Mobile Dev Memo that articulates an AI Bull Thesis for the digital economy. It argues that the pervasive application of AI to the digital...
Stranger Things Dominates Netflix's H2 2025 Top‑10 List
Stranger Things took three of the top 10 positions in Netflix’s most-watched content list for the second half of 2025. Season 1, which premiered almost 10 years ago, ranked #5. https://t.co/MdjWiYMI1Q
Google Spurned VCG for Complexity and Higher Bids
Google initially rejected the VCG auction design in 2002 because (1) it would be harder for advertisers to understand than GSP and (2) it would likely require them to increase their bids, since it incentivizes truthful bidding. https://t.co/jgf9YOpSZ0
Unity's AI-Powered Ad Platform Vector Transforms Mobile Advertising
In this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak to Felix The, the SVP of Advertising Product and Engineering at Unity. We discuss Unity’s AI-enabled advertising system, Vector. https://t.co/YKAGMtaYaP
OpenAI’s $100M Ad Spend Fueled by Novelty Demand
OpenAI’s $100MM advertising run rate is almost entirely a function of “novelty demand” since they launched a primitive product with little optimization capacity. Relevant questions: 1) How much better does the platform get?, 2) Where does demand settle when they...
Apple's Privacy Focus Limits AI Ambitions, Favors On-Device Models
I’ve argued that Apple is constrained by what it can do with AI by its privacy narrative. Apple *has* trained foundation models, and they have a proprietary ~3BN LLM available on device via Foundation Models Framework. They also offer other...
Meta’s New Ad Checkout Isn’t True Agentic Commerce
Meta partners with Stripe for in-ad shopping If Instant Checkout didn’t represent agentic commerce, using that term to describe Meta’s new ‘purchase-from-an-ad’ experience is simply absurd. An agent plays no role in this transaction: a user sees an ad and clicks...
AppLovin Deploys AI Video Creatives for In-Game Ads
AppLovin launches AI-enabled video creative generation AppLovin is launching AI-enabled video generation to optimize eCommerce ads for in-game environments. By repurposing assets through generative models, the platform addresses the performance gap between social media creatives and full-screen mobile placements. This rollout...
Ad Agencies Must Fill Data Gaps in Early ChatGPT Ads
Two thoughts on reporting from @theinformation that early ChatGPT ad campaigns lacked performance data: - this is to be expected. Any early offering will feature limited functionality. Early adopters should be prepared to fill measurement gaps themselves. - Measuring and credibly asserting...
Platform-Owned Agents Outshine Independent Commerce Bots
The fundamental issue with independent agentic commerce, and what almost certainly led OpenAI to shutter Instant Checkout after just a few months, and Walmart to pivot toward pushing Sparky into other chatbots rather than facilitating direct checkout, is what I've...
OpenAI's “Do Everything” Strategy Sparks Focus Concerns
"Current and former employees said that last year’s “do everything” approach sometimes created a lack of focus, and that it was at times difficult to understand OpenAI’s strategic direction." https://t.co/omLqyiRhtE
Uber Sued over $10M Fraudulent App Install Scheme
Worth noting that Uber sued an app marketing agency in 2019, alleging that it knowingly bought tens of millions of dollars in fraudulent traffic. So I’m not sure Uber ever saw its unit economics defined as unlimited free app installs. https://t.co/sGvPKJdlv2
Criteo CEO Discusses AI‑Powered RecSys, Automation, OpenAI Deal
This week on the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I interview Criteo’s CEO about the company’s RecSys system for retail use cases, its Criteo GO automation platform, and its recently-announced partnership with OpenAI. https://t.co/Tuy7wrnLJg
Meta Licensing Gemini Could Make It World’s Most Used AI
If it is true that Meta licenses Gemini to power MetaAI, and I find it somewhat dubious, it would be an incredible coup for Google and give Gemini a credible claim as the world’s most scaled model by consumer use...
Big Platforms Already Embrace Agentic Commerce and Advertising
Platforms and native agent proximity One can’t consider the future of agentic commerce, or agentic advertising, as a competition between nimble upstarts and inflexible, staid incumbents: the largest platforms have embraced agentic interaction models. If you believe that consumers will demand...
Meta Adds DST Fees; Advertisers Must Manually Adjust Budgets
Meta announced today that it will begin applying "location fees" to ads run in countries that charge digital service taxes (DST) on digitally fulfilled ads. Those countries are: Austria: 5% France: 3% Italy: 3% Turkey: 5% UK: 2% Notably, automated campaign budget allocation logic will not take...
U.S. Leads Global Oil Production with 21% Share
The United States is the world’s #1 producer of oil, contributing 21% of the world’s share in 2024, nearly double that of the #2 producer, Saudi Arabia (11.2%). https://t.co/Vzb3UVlW1D
Compute Limits or Surplus Define Meta's Ad Revenue Future
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Meta's investments into GEM and its LLaTTE architecture, and last week, I wrote about Meta's use of LLMs for ad re-ranking (prioritizing the ad shown from a candidate set). Both of these approaches are...
Google Revamps Play Store Fees and Sideloading Rules
Google is overhauling its policies on alternative app store sideloading and in-app billing, as well as its fee structure in Google Play. These changes will be rolled out starting in June. https://t.co/zaX2n1nIq0
Apple Could Monetize Default AI Like Safari Search
AI Tracking Transparency In November, Apple updated its App Store developer guidelines to require developers to obtain affirmative, opt-in consent from users before sending “personal data” to third-party AI services. A pertinent question is: if Apple is able to dissuade developers...
Language Feedback Can Substitute Rewards in Reinforcement Learning
Can natural language replace scalar rewards in reinforcement learning? A new paper from researchers at Stanford, UMD, Netflix, and Microsoft Research presents a formal structure for utilizing natural language as feedback in a reinforcement learning setting they call Learning from Language...