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- [00:00]
Alan Chappelle
Foreign welcome to the Monopoly Report the Monopoly Report is dedicated to chronicling and analyzing the impact of antitrust and other regulations on the global advertising economy. In this week's Monopoly Report newsletter, I write about Google's deprecation of third party cookies via choice prompts in connection with Google's privacy sandbox commitments to the UK Competition and Markets Authority. In my view, the choice prompt discussion is really nothing more than a distraction, as deprecation via choice prompts really does not change any of the underlying competition concerns that were initially raised by the cma. If you were new to the Monopoly Report, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter at Monopoly Market and you can check out all the Monopoly report podcasts@monopolyreportpod.com I'm Alan Chappelle. This week my guest is Ricky Sutton, who runs the Future Media newsletter, which focuses on the collision of big media and big tech AI, future business models for media, and the global antitrust movement. I'm really excited to get Ricky's thoughts on the future of publishing industry. So we're going to talk publishing here. Let's have at it. Hey Ricky, thanks for coming on the pod. How are you man?
- [01:20]
Ricky Sutton
Morning, Alan. How are you, mate? Delighted to be here.
- [01:22]
Alan Chappelle
I'm doing great. So you started out your career as a journalist and in some ways we have that in common. I started out as a musician and there's some similarities between the two. I mean, for one thing, I don't think you make a lot of money going into journalism. You certainly don't make a lot of money going into music. But I think there's another similarity is that whatever else you do in your life, being in journalism, it never really leaves you. And so I'm just curious, how does your background in news frame your thinking as you approach the rest of your career?
- [01:53]
Ricky Sutton
Yeah, it's fascinating. So I can honestly tell you that my love of journalism has really been the backbone of my whole life. Okay, so just a really little bit of history. Just so you understand, my dad was a crazy adventurer. When he was 15 years old, he didn't go to school because he'd faked his passport and his birth certificate and had joined the Navy. And so by the time he, his school were worried about where he was, he was halfway around the world. And so he kind of lived that kind of crazy life. And so he very much taught me from an early age that you should just go and chase whatever it is that absolutely drives. You know, you can feel your DNA vibrating with excitement. What's that going to be and for me, I wanted to see the whole world, but I had a slightly more defined view. I wanted to be a war correspondent. Really clearly I wanted to be a war correspondent. And I was 12. And my dad's advice to me was, you should absolutely go and do that, Ricky, but don't get killed because your mother will kill me. And so for me, by the time I was 20, I was a war correspondent in the Balkans. So I was in the Bosnian and the Kosovo wars, covering them. I got to see war firsthand and in a very kind of important time in my life. And really that set my view for the whole world, which is nothing's ever as good as it looks or as bad as it looks. Humanity has an incredible ability to survive, but also, you don't just take what you're told. You sometimes have to go and look what's really happening. And that was the ideal training to be a journalist.
- [03:19]
Alan Chappelle
Well, so as between you and your dad, the apple plopped straight down, it sounds like.
- [03:26]
Ricky Sutton
Yeah. When my dad got to New Zealand on that first trip with the Navy, they'd identified on the way that he was underage because it was the, I think late 50s or early 60s. They literally dumped him, 15 years old in New Zealand, said, we can't have you on the boat. They gave him a whip, round of money from the crew and then left him there for a year and picked him up next time they came around and he went and started his naval career.
- [03:49]
Alan Chappelle
Wow. So you're clearly more of a publisher, a journalism guy, and I'm an ad tech guy. I mean, that's where I've buttered my bread, as they say, over the years. And so in my view, publishers have really had very legitimate complaints, but complaints about diminishing revenue for decades, long before Meta and Google really ruled the world. And so walk me through some of the history here, coming at this as a publisher in the ad space.
- [04:21]
Ricky Sutton
So I ended up at the kind of peak of my publishing career as the news editor of the largest circulation English language newspaper in the world. Okay? And so we sold 4 to 5 million newspapers a week and we were read by about 60 million people. And I can tell you that if you wanted to put a full page ad in the newspaper, just one page, it would cost you £50,000 per page. And we had 136 pages in the paper. All right? It was an incredibly lucrative business. And it was a trade. It was a trade that you got to associate your brand with the name of the title. You got to associate yourself with the journalism of that title. And it was a transaction that worked for 20, 30 years. And my experience is that all monopolies tend to work for 20, 30 years. And so, you know, I'd very clearly say to you now viewing the world through a slightly older and wiser lens, that we absolutely were a monopoly at the time. It was a cartel. It worked perfectly. The print media industry sold really high value ads. The marketers were happy to buy the ads. It worked for all parties. But what then happened, obviously, is that like all monopolies, they eventually passed their time and the newspaper industry started to decline. Not because the quality of the journalism had necessarily fallen, although that's become a trope these days. It was more about the fact that the, you know, the delivery mechanism had changed. And so if you think about it, if you're a newspaper, the way you get your newspaper to the person's house is with a paperboy. What we now had was a digital paper boy. And they were everywhere and they were delivering to every house on the planet. And we lost control of distribution. We just lost it. And the paperboys became the trillionaires because they controlled distribution. So every single time we delivered a newspaper to somebody, that Google paperboy charged us. Every single time. And then of course, in 2007, when Google then decided to also become an advertiser, they were then taking a clip of ticket on delivery and they were taking a clip of the ticket on every ad on every page. And that was rising and rising and rising. And eventually the economics just didn't make sense. Now for me, you know, this is where I get on my high horse. I think that's actually a net negative for the world. I think Google's a net positive. I think that Google's monopoly is a net negative because as a result, we have probably a time when we need news reporting that to be fearless and comprehensive and a plurality of opinions and we need to tell the stories of the world now more than ever at exactly the period that we're choosing to not tell the stories around the world because the industry has been diminished. And so really that's the war I'm now covering is trying to solve that.
- [06:58]
Alan Chappelle
So the narrative that I've always been sold over the last 10 or 15 years is that the wheels really started coming off the trolley once you separated content and data. So the whole concept used to call it behavioral targeting, behavioral advertising. They're now calling it a whole bunch of other things. But the idea that you can pull data from a digital property a and use it on digital property B and C. I mean, everybody listening to this, that's kind of old news. But what's your sense of the role of just that act in the current demise of the publishing industry?
- [07:32]
Ricky Sutton
Yeah, look, I want to be really clear about something before I answer this question, which is that I actually think the news industry is probably as much, if not more to blame. So I can tell you right now that, you know, the publishers at the highest level and in the boardrooms all over the world were all engaged with Google and everybody else way, way, way, like in the late 90s and nobody could find a way to talk. And the way I always joke about it, although it's a bit of a dark joke with media, global media companies these days, is that, you know, I say media industry, you were speaking fluent French to a company that only spoke Swahili and you were both utterly fluent in your languages, but you were talking about the same things in different ways. And if you found a way to collaborate, we could have created a, a winning model for both content creation and content monetization. But you didn't do that. And the publishers chose to fight rather than collaborate. And worse than that, they decided to fight with indignation, not with strategy and just whinging about your right to exist. When you've been a cartel for 20 years, sympathy is zero. Okay? And so, you know, I think they've made a whole series of mistakes and I think we have a terrible paucity of leadership. And all of you media CEOs who I work with that are going to say to me, that's rude, I don't care, okay? It's the problem we have and the problem we have to solve. So yes, if you have 60 million readers and you don't quite know who they are, but you know that it's pretty much four in five people in Britain, then you can sell advertising against that. But if you want to target 25 to 35 year old white collar professional women in Brighton that want to buy a washing machine, that you can't do. And so the technology definitely pushed the world ahead, no doubt. Okay. And Google and others have done an absolutely stellar job. My argument would be, Alan, is that you don't have to kill the hand that feeds in a desperate, relentless and continuous aggressive attack on profit. Eventually you just eat all the resources. And I think that's where we're at in the market. And so I think they've just gone too far. And I think that's why we'll probably talk about it. But I think that that's why eventually you end up at antitrust. When your plague of locusts has eaten all the field, where do you go next?
- [09:41]
Alan Chappelle
Okay, so as we head into 2025, or we're now actually into 2025, it feels like we're halfway through 2025 already, and it's barely feminine. Yeah, but what do you see as the existential challenges for the publishing industry? I mean, is it monetization? Is it discovery? Is it distribution? Is it all of the above? Like, walk me through that.
- [10:04]
Ricky Sutton
Yeah, so we kind of alluded to it already. So publishing loss, distribution. You don't want to be in a business when you don't control distribution. Right? That's the first thing, Right. Go ask the bookstores about Amazon. Right? So you do not want to lose control to distribution. You also don't want to lose control of discovery, because if you don't control your discovery, then either the number of people that can see you can diminish, go up or down, or your brand might be treated in a way that you don't like. And so if you don't control that, you've got another problem. But ultimately you can solve those problems if you've got enough money. But if you haven't got any money either, then you're under attack from all three sides. So here's a funny, funny thing. When I sit down and talk to media executives anywhere in the world, I say to them, they ask me to help them with a project. You know, it might be a new release, it might be a new strategy, whatever it might be. And I say to them every single time in the first sentence, what is success for you? What does it look like if in a year's time you've won everything? What is it? And they say, oh, you know, more readers. And I go, okay. And they'll say, oh, more subscriptions. And I'll go, all right. And we have this conversation, we go round and round and round, and then eventually, 10 minutes later, I go, so it's actually about revenue, right? And they go, yes, it is. And I go, the fact that you think that last is the entirety of your problem. You cannot compete unless you've got fuel in the tank. Your car is going precisely no distance at all, no matter how fancy it is or how great the tires are or how powerful the engine is if it has no fuel. So you are not in the content business right now. What you are in is in the monetization business to enable you to be a content business. And I really think that's the existential risk. Let me give you another example. I used this on stage the other day, and it's very colorful. But here's the deal, right? You're an Olympic sprinter. You're the best in the world. You are Usain Belt, you are the guy. You can go like the clappers. You're faster than a greyhound, right? But if you put that athlete in a room, okay, and make it airtight and systematically remove the oxygen from the room, eventually that athlete will slow down, they'll start to pant, and eventually they will be incapable of running at all. Does that make them a bad sprinter? No, it makes them a suffocating sprinter. I think the news industry is still fabulous, but it's suffocating. We just need to reoxygenate the industry.
- [12:26]
Alan Chappelle
But how do we do that?
- [12:28]
Ricky Sutton
Well, I think the first thing you do is what we're starting to see already happen. So I think you have to break the monopoly. We've reached a situation where the ad market is growing and every publisher, including the cfo, will probably, I am the head of sales, will probably tell you, any publisher that the ad market's been in decline for 11 years. But that's not true. The ad market's in growth and has been for 11 years. I know this because I've got numbers all over my wall here showing me all of the growth of all the tech companies that are all making more and more money from advertising. So it's clear as a bell that the advertising market as a whole is growing. It's just the publishers aren't getting any of it. And so we've automated the system to an extent that all growth in the ad market goes automatically to the tech companies and the publishers don't see any of it. So that means that we now have a market that can't be competitive because any dollar automatically just flows down that pipe. So we need antitrust to break the monopoly. And as you're very aware, and as I've covered for the last 18 months, you know, Google's lost two antitrust trials and it's about to lose. My prediction, it's facing a verdict on the ad antitrust trial, which I think they're going to lose as well. And we're going to see a shake up in the ad market. So that's going to re. Enable or, or share or level the playing field to enable other people to play. It is going to cause a period of chaos. I hear this a lot and everybody's like, oh, no, chaos is a disaster. I'm like if you're losing to a monopoly, chaos is opportunity. And if you still think that you're going to lose, you probably need to retire. It comes back to my leadership point, right? There's no point in winning a battle if you're not willing to continue to fight the war.
- [14:10]
Alan Chappelle
Right.
- [14:11]
Ricky Sutton
You have to get in the fight. So I think that the number one is to break the monopoly. Number two is we then need to break the reliance in the ad holding groups and in the major clients to recognize that there is advertising outside Google. So anybody under the age of 30 working in marketing only ever knows Google and thinks that Google and advertising are synonymous. They're not. There was advertising before Google and they'll be advertising after the Google we have today. And so we have to do that. So there are hearts and minds to be won. But what I think is actually going to happen is that there is a point of change happening now. And I alluded to it earlier on, every monopoly, every cartel I've been, one of them lasts about 20 or 25 years. And Google is 25 years old. So they've had an epic run. It's been absolutely brilliant. But I think their time is just starting to end.
- [15:03]
Alan Chappelle
Well, we'll see if you're right. It's funny, I want to react to a couple of things that you said. One of them is there's sort of a tendency in the digital media space, everything is growing, but the way we operate here is based on distraction. It's like a distraction strategy. So everybody's jumping on the CTV bandwagon now. And look, that's where a lot of the revenue opportunities are. So I'm not being critical of that. We've spent five years dancing around will there be cookies? Will there not be cookies? Do we have addressability? Will we ever have addressability? Now that was actually created by Google. The other ones aren't. We tend to just operate under this. We're running around like chickens cut off of our head. And the only reason sometimes that we all do well is because of the rising tide. But the problem with that, and this is just goes beyond publishers in my view. The problem with that is that rising tide only helps you so much as long as you're getting a decent percentage of the rising tide. And what's happened is that everybody is getting a smaller and smaller share of that rising tide and it's getting tougher. This just goes beyond publishers. I mean, the ad tech communities, a lot of them are struggling as well.
- [16:15]
Ricky Sutton
Yeah, I'd throw a macroeconomic challenge on the top of that as well. That became clear probably really for the first time in the earnings reports of the major advertising companies in the past week or two. And it's that there's actually no real advertising growth of any meaningful volume coming out of the US or the UK or Europe anymore is coming out of China. So a fascinating case that, you know, in Meta's earnings report, the largest growth of advertising of all of the, of all of the regions for Meta came out of China. So it was over 150% in the last two years and it represented a quarter of all Meta's growth. What's really even more interesting about that is that, you know, when the, when the CFO Susan Lee was asked in the investor call that I was on about China, her response was really telling you. Remember I said earlier on about when you're covering a war, you can hear what people tell you, but you need to be there to see it, to be able to find the truth in the noise. Right. And so what did she say? She said, no, we've had growth in loads of regions, but US growth was 42% over the last two years and China was 158%. So, like, which one is it? Yeah, because one of those is bigger than the other, Right. And so you have to sit down and read the SEC filings and you have to dig deep. But that's why I'm a journalist, right? And that's why, you know, it's we, we need to do this kind of research because ultimately, if matters growth is going to be coming out of China for the next two or three years, how's that going to go down in the White House? And if you look at Apple, right, 70% of the Apple's iPhones, its Hero products are made in China. Right. And so to your point, right, there is growth, but the growth's not coming from the traditional markets. The growth is starting to come from the east. And that collides with politics. And that's a whole different podcast. Okay, I appreciate it, but it's important to recognize that that's going to be what's driving growth for the next little month.
- [18:08]
Alan Chappelle
The other thing, just to drive home, you mentioned the agency holding companies. I had Ariel Garcia on the pod recently. We're talking about the Omnicom IPG merger.
- [18:17]
Ricky Sutton
That's amazing, isn't she?
- [18:18]
Alan Chappelle
Oh, she's wonderful. Super smart and has some great insights about this. But one of the things she pointed out is that it's the rebates. I mean, Google does an amazing job of spreading their money around. I mean, on some level, of course, the agencies are selecting Google. Look, and I don't want to. They have some great products, but it doesn't hurt that they're greasing palms over at the agencies. Now that's creating a similar problem that we're talking about here for the publisher industry that's creating its own set of changes, challenges for the agency holding companies.
- [18:51]
Ricky Sutton
Well, as I said, we, you know, we have to break the monopoly that Google has, number one. But the second thing is we need to win the holding companies. And that's one of the, one of the symptoms that we need to fix. Okay, let's put this on notice. Let's go public with this. All right, so there's nothing I love than a good investigation. So I have found where a large advertising company that we've already talked about on this call is taking a whole load of executives for an offsite on a very, very nice tropical island. And they are going to sit down and they're going to talk strategy. It's got nothing to do with rebates or kickbacks, of course, but what it's got to do is taking a whole load of decision makers from holding companies to a nice place to sit cocktails. And guess who's going to be sat there in the background quietly without them knowing I'm there. I'm going to be there. So I've decided to go and listen in to what's happening and then I'm going to come back and I'm going to write about it. And this is the kind of if you're the publishing industry and you've been taken down by a monopoly, you should go and investigate that. If a government was trying to shut down a newspaper, the newspaper would investigate the government. If a criminal enterprise was attacking children in their country, a newspaper would go and investigate the number of people investigating Google and Meta. Okay, I could probably count on two hands, and that's the problem. So it's left to those of us that still have some kind of fury. Oh, by the way, I'm mad as hell, Alan. Some of us have still got some gumption to get out there and do the job for them. Drag what's hidden into the light.
- [20:24]
Alan Chappelle
Yeah, and there's a certain strength to just not giving two, you know, what's. And so some people will just try to find the truth. And this isn't to disparage. There's still some great work going on, folks covering the antitrust trials. There's some analysis there, but you're right is that overall it's been a little thin and that needs to change.
- [20:50]
Ricky Sutton
Yeah, I've seen more coverage of Queen Catherine, Princess Catherine. I've seen more coverage of Taylor Swift than I've seen of antitrust. And it's the largest business story in human history. So you know, I had a look Bernie Madoff. The total amount of money involved in the Bernie Madoff scandal was $4 billion and Google's currently at 300 billion. So you know, if you want to have a look at, you know, what the size of the story we're covering is, you know, that's, that's the, you know, the share price alone of Apple is larger than the entire UK stock exchange. So these stories are not being covered by the business media or by the media really in general given the size of the impact that they have. And so that troubles me because it gives me the idea, the sense, pretty much the certainty that these media companies are so diminished and so reliant, it's like Stockholm syndrome. They will support the kidnapper because they have no other place to go.
- [21:49]
Alan Chappelle
All right, well I want to share a little bit of an anecdote. So we're all covering the Google search antitrust remedy space and the Department of Justice intends to call LA Times president Chris Argentier to talk about Google's ability to use its monopoly power over search traffic to extract publishers content for AI based search features and that their rivals and entrants must pay for. So there at least seem to be knocking on the right door. But I want to ask a broader question with that example. Do you think there's real momentum around antitrust and is it going to ultimately result in a more competitive marketplace?
- [22:27]
Ricky Sutton
I think there's real momentum around antitrust but I don't think it's because of publishing. I think it's because of politics. The great thing that you learn with age and experience is that politicians are incredibly motivated when it's self motivated. Okay, so they want power, they want to be re elected, they want to be the prime minister in many cases or you know, president. And so you have to figure out how to. If you're a publisher and you want a change in the world to support your business, you need to be able to talk to them in a way that generates their self interest. So that's a strategic thing. In my experience, publishers and the colleague you just mentioned there from the LA Times, it's not a journalist, he's a business development guy. And so he's going to walk in and he's going to explain why their business is challenged, but then he's going to back it up with indignation. And I've said more times than I can possibly tell you that indignation is a shitty, shitty business model and it's an even worse strategy. And so you've got to figure out something else. The answer here is politics. What is your problem? What do you need? And why would you feel motivated to assist us as an industry? Now, the person that's done that best ever has not been anyone from the news industry. It's been Jonathan Kanter from the doj, the recently departed head of antitrust at the doj. He was able to very, very, very clearly explain why the monopoly diminished the media industry, which ultimately diminished, harmed prices for everyday people in the street. It had issues around taxation. The numbers weren't being made public to anybody, advertisers were paying more money and ultimately it hit everybody in the hip pocket. Suddenly voters are affected, suddenly politicians are interested. So I think that there's been a strategic failure of the industry as a whole up to now. But antitrust, I believe here now will happen. And so we've got a different White House, sure. But they are also motivated to ensure that share prices continue to rise, that people in the street are feeling that they are getting a good outcome from their political leaders. They are seeing a, you know, making America for putting America first again is a very strong narrative. And that means those tech companies that have had a pretty much free run forever are now going to have to figure out how to fit in with that new agenda. That's a change in politics, not a change in strategy from the media industry. I think the media industry could do a better job of actually getting on that track. I think that's where they should go.
- [25:05]
Alan Chappelle
Fair enough. And I think that makes sense to me. I mean, you and I have talked about this offline a bit. I mean, I'm still a little cautiously optimistic is probably where I am right now. But given some of the historical headwinds around real antitrust reform have been really strong in the last 50 years, at least in the states. And then with the current administration, who is someone used the term mercurial, which I thought was really kind of a wonderful term to describe the current administration.
- [25:38]
Ricky Sutton
Let me put it to you like this though, Alan. Imagine that. So you've just said that there's been a 50 year free run without anti, without tough antitrust measures. Remember we talked earlier on about every era having a 20 to 25 year lifespan. So if you think about it. In those 50 years you saw the run up of mass media through the first 25 years of that free space, if you like. And then the peak of that was the enablement and the creation of the new digital economy, which is now run for 25 years. And then after 50 years, regulators have figured out this has gone up and now it's gone down and now we need to fix it. Right. So if you view it as almost like a 50 year biorhythm, you know, what we're seeing is the inevitable outcome where you need to fix it.
- [26:18]
Alan Chappelle
I hope you're right. I wanted to just change a bit here and talk a little bit about specifically AI because that's sort of the thing everybody's talking about now. But it has a pretty unique impact on the publishing industry. And you and I've talked a little about this. So how is AI surfaced itself here as both a challenge and an opportunity for publishers?
- [26:38]
Ricky Sutton
Yeah. So just really quickly before we dive into that, know that, you know, in 2014 I started an AI company and so I built an AI when all of these AIs didn't exist. We actually wrote one from scratch. And I remember going to investors and they were just like, you're out of your gourd. You are mad. It's never ever going to happen. You are nuts. And then I sold it a year and a half ago and that was great. We were then. Right. You have to be in early to learn at the edge. I think that I get asked about this more than anything else by the publishers that I talk to. I believe it's a replatforming of the way humans communicate. And I'll explain what I mean. So I used to print newspapers on chop down trees and deliver them to houses 400 miles away. For a pang, that was my business model. Makes no sense when you view it now. Look at the smile on your face. You're like, what are you talking about? You must be absolutely crazy. But that's what we.
- [27:31]
Alan Chappelle
It's like the phone companies who still insist on, you know, dropping a, a big old dossier of everybody's telephone numbers and addresses on my. That's right on my front steps.
- [27:41]
Ricky Sutton
Thanks very much. That's awesome. Doorstop, right? So you know, that's, that's kind of the business we used to be in then. We've had the digital era where it's been about putting words and pictures on a page and driving views to it. Right. And then putting ads on those pages which in my view of the world, and this isn't new. I viewed this for, you know, more than a decade. Is all we've done is created a digital facsimile of what we used to do in a newspaper. All right? And so if that's our business model, right, choose one or the other, but don't do both. Like, just make your mind up, right? And so that doesn't make sense. So here where we're at right now is that the Internet's much more than just news. I appreciate that it's everything, but we're still deciding to kind of read it in words and pictures. And that doesn't make any sense because that's not the way humans communicate. The way we talk, you know, is gestures and conversations and emphasis and, you know, all of these things, all of these kind of ways that tell a message that goes way beyond just a written word. This would be a pretty dull podcast if it was just words running across the screen, right? So AI finally enables us to garnish the way that we communicate. And ultimately, when we won, when we've won at this new digital era is going to be when communication online is the same as communication offline between two humans. And we're starting to get there, right? So I'm starting to think, see things like Notebook LM, and I'm starting to see other products where we're starting to get a human like conversation or a human like communication taking place. So actually what I think is, is that we saw print go to digital, we saw HTML go to mobile. I think we're in that we saw mobile probably start to go to devices and conversation, but I think that AI is probably the next one. And I'd say that even the gap between digital and mobile is smaller. This is as big as print to digital and then digital to AI. So I think that all of the future of communication will be audio and visual, or navigation will be audio and visual, or delivery will be audio and visual. And I think that websites will kind of be viewed a little bit like, you know, a copy of the New York Times from 1987.
- [29:51]
Alan Chappelle
So I just want to tie this up in a bow, as they say, what are the things that publishers should be doing? And maybe I also want to find out, what are they doing? Are they doing any of those things?
- [30:01]
Ricky Sutton
The top line strategy has to be, we need to win three things. We need to win distribution, okay? We need to win monetization, and we need to fix discovery. So all of three of those publishers are now reliant on a third party for. And if you don't own those things. You don't own a business. You create widgets in a factory. You're the factory factory worker, not the factory boss. I don't care if you are the New York Times. You work on the assembly line in that model. All right, as you can imagine, sometimes my, my presentation style doesn't always go down great with the, you know, the most powerful media people in the world. But I think you have to tell it how it really is right from outside the bubble. Now, that starts with antitrust. So if you fix antitrust, then you're going to see a change in delivery, because search monopoly is going to change. So it's not going to no longer be the case that, you know, Google is the default on the iPhone and on Android, meaning it owns 100% of the of the mobile market. Right, that's going to change. And so suddenly you've got some opportunities for distribution outside those monopolies. When you come to discovery, I think that search is ending. We're seeing that happen already. And we're starting to see, you know, new tools like OpenAI and others enabling voice discovery and more compelling discovery of content. I think media companies need to get in there. And by the way, before they all go and run in and do a deal with OpenAI, which they're all rushing to do and hoping you're just creating the next Google, fellas, you need to build your own. So let's not make the same mistake again. And then when it comes to monetization, we need that third antitrust trial to drop. And if it drops the way we want, then we might see a future where not every single publisher on the planet relies on Google Ad Manager and relies on adex for every ad, we might actually have a situation where, I don't know, here's an idea. Maybe some of those salespeople get their asses off the couch and go and actually sell some stuff. And that has not been happening for 20 years because it's been easier just to sit there in Stockholm syndrome and say, we can't win. You can win. You need to win. And if you intend to be working in the industry in 25 minutes, you must win. So just get on with it.
- [32:08]
Alan Chappelle
That's a great place to end it. Ricky, been wonderful to have you on. Been a real pleasure talking to you. Thanks so much.
- [32:15]
Ricky Sutton
All right, thanks an.
- [32:18]
Alan Chappelle
That was a great conversation. We've got a bunch of other fantastic guests coming up on the Monopoly Report podcast over the next few weeks. Next we've got Anna Milicevic at Sparrow Advisors where she and I will be talking about the digital media this space without HTTP cookies and kind of sharing some back and forth there. So please subscribe to the show@monopolyreportpod.com or on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, or wherever you listen to your podcast.