Keep pulling the thread on Alex Rampell & Justine Moore.
In e-commerce, aggregators like Shopify and Amazon have become durable businesses, whereas direct-to-consumer brands like Allbirds and Casper have struggled to achieve long-term durability despite initial revenue growth.
The primary beneficiaries of the direct-to-consumer brand model, exemplified by companies like Casper, were Google and Facebook, who profited from the brands' advertising spend to acquire customers.
Alex predicts that the "tax on GDP" currently captured by Google's search business is at risk of shifting to other platforms, likely AI-native ones.
Apple earns tens of billions of dollars annually from a deal with Google to make it the default search engine in products like Safari.
Google is currently losing non-commercial, informational search queries to AI tools like ChatGPT, but has not yet seen a significant loss in monetizable, commercial search queries.
ChatGPT has approximately 800 million weekly active users.
Overall search query volume on Google is declining.
Costco's net income is almost entirely derived from its membership fees, not from margins on the products it sells.
Amazon has a significant and highly profitable advertising business, with ads that direct users off-site representing a 100% gross margin revenue stream.
Amazon's high-margin advertising business is at risk of being disrupted by AI agents that will intermediate the user experience and control the presentation layer of commerce.
Google's business model functions as a tax on GDP by taking a percentage of consumer spending through per-click charges on its search platform.
The price tracking service CamelCamelCamel is believed to be Amazon's largest affiliate partner.