For those of you that weren't able to make it through the entire report, there's this gem:
"90% of Google's revenues come from advertising. We expect Alphabet’s share price to go down by 75%. We get this number by revising its earnings down by 30%, stripping its 30x PE off its "growth premium" down to 15x, and factoring in the reputational damage."
The authors clearly assume that most of Google's ad revenue is from advertisers who don't track how much they spend on media relative to how much they earn -- when in fact their entire business model and the ad auction model they created is predicated on this. If the cost of driving a user to your site from a Google search results exceeds the expected value of that user, advertisers can adjust their bids accordingly.
1. It's reasonable that shoppers (with the help of a mobile app routing them) can complete multiple deliveries / hour.
2. They won't have to increase prices but are negotiating better pricing from the stores they work with (most of ICs profit comes from the items themselves, not the delivery fee they charge).
3. Compensation won't go down, but perhaps it won't rise as quickly as courrier utilization does.
It's difficult to reconcile the Flurry stats with the fact that most blogs / publishers are seeing a higher percentage of their traffic come from mobile web (>50% in many cases).
One reason could be that their stats don't include mobile web usage within apps (i.e. FB / Twitter). That discounts a lot of my own browsing behavior.
Also, as someone pointed out in the comments of the article, if you count video games in the "time spent in apps", then really it's the gaming consoles and devices that are losing out, not mobile websites, so the discrepancy between web and apps is overstated.
As always, look at the data for your own website/service before deciding which path to take.
From Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic: "All of our stories that do well on Hacker News share one thing: they are written. By written, I mean that someone took the time and effort to examine individual sentences, to think about word choices, to create transitions between grafs, to describe things precisely. You know, writing! But a lot of what gets posted in the tech blogosphere doesn't fit this definition of writing. It's more in the tradition of the wire services, where speed rules over creativity. That the Hacker News community both recognizes and rewards pieces that are written makes me love it."
There has been plenty of commentary and feedback about how businesses view Groupon, but less about users. What is the prototypical Groupon user? A coupon chasing cheapo or someone who is looking to try new places in their city?
Great site and a great community that keeps adding fresh content (a la HN). There's a solid mix of designer & developer related news and I always seem to find myself learning something new when I visit the site. Keep up the good work guys!
"90% of Google's revenues come from advertising. We expect Alphabet’s share price to go down by 75%. We get this number by revising its earnings down by 30%, stripping its 30x PE off its "growth premium" down to 15x, and factoring in the reputational damage."
The authors clearly assume that most of Google's ad revenue is from advertisers who don't track how much they spend on media relative to how much they earn -- when in fact their entire business model and the ad auction model they created is predicated on this. If the cost of driving a user to your site from a Google search results exceeds the expected value of that user, advertisers can adjust their bids accordingly.