The Information's TITV
00:35:07 · Saanya Ojha
[00:35:07] S4: Yeah. I mean, that's definitely the case. I think advertisers will care when their MAUs start going in reverse and if the ice cubes start shrinking. Then there's going to be a conversation about where do we spend our money. Honestly, I think even advertisers, it's hard to say where to go at this point because Google isn't working as effectively as it did. A lot of the underlying assets it relies on are also kind of struggling to find their footing in this new world. I think, theoretically, if they can keep their user growth and the login doesn't dissuade that, I think they're going to see a higher quality of base. From an advertiser perspective, a dedicated, engaged community where you know what you're getting is probably better than a lot of people that don't actually engage with the platform. So it can cut either way. And I think we're going to see a lot of people try to gate access and curate these communities on the web that are not as open as they used to be because they used to give away content in the hope of traffic and now they're not getting traffic. So there's no reason to give away content. The economic bargain completely shifts.
00:36:26 · Akash Pasricha, Saanya Ojha
[00:36:26] S0: Right. And you also pointed to some of the other platforms, Pinterest, Quora, Yelp, as other platforms that are probably going through the same story here. Do you see there being consolidation between some of these platforms as they all grapple with the same issue? Could we see, I don't know, maybe Reddit merge with one of these companies, acquire one of these companies? Don't even know what the relative size is of some of these businesses, but feels like it would be a better story here to consolidate, right? [00:36:57] S4: You know, they just serve very different niches. You go to Pinterest for a very different reason than you go to Yelp. I honestly think that if the overlap with the AI overviews, etc, whatever consumers are using now is very, very high, then you kind of get to a point of stack overflow ification of that entity. [00:37:25] S0: If What that mean? [00:37:27] S4: I mean, dude, have you seen the search traffic for Stack Overflow and the number of queries that are generated and the number of people that are on the platform? It's like this, and then there were the heyday of Stack Overflow and then AI came and it's kind of just gone out of existence. [00:37:43] S0: What is... Sorry. Stack Overflow. Am I maybe... Am I... Have I missed this whole?
00:37:43 · Akash Pasricha, Saanya Ojha
[00:37:43] S0: What is... Sorry. Stack Overflow. Am I maybe... Am I... Have I missed this whole? [00:37:48] S4: Stack Overflow was this website where, you know, goders, programmers would go and essentially write there would be a it's a bank of issues that they have run into. And other people would comment and tell them, Hey, this is how I solved this, etcetera, etcetera. So it sort of became the accumulated wisdom of coders and programmers over a number of years that helped people. It was like the Bible that you looked at when you ran into issues. It's just not how coding works anymore. Stack Overflow, ask any developer, they immediately know what you're talking about. It was like up there with lead code as like one of the things that every coder knows. Yeah, at this point it's kind of like an abandoned website. No one goes there anymore. If you have a question, you ask your LLM. And most of the time, you aren't even coding yourself anymore. You're just dangerously skipping permissions. I think probably either find a way if you're at the scale of Pinterest, Yelp, Reddit that are all doing very different things. So I don't think consolidation makes sense. Different models, everything. If you're at that scale, either you defend your castle or you go the path of Stack Overflow and become a feature within the chatbot. And that's that. The agent just does exactly what you promised.
00:39:19 · Akash Pasricha, Saanya Ojha
[00:39:19] S0: Right. Right. Okay. Yeah. I know. I seek... I hear you on them doing different things, but I don't know. I'm thinking about media businesses and different types of publishers and these media conglomerates that ended up shaping up. I wonder if this is just another version of that story playing out. I don't know the answer, and I'm also not I [00:39:47] S4: mean, that's the thought. You could have a whole... You're very creative. [00:39:50] S0: Yeah, no. Because Conde Nast, just because you had different magazines and different publishers, they ended up all being under a holding company. And then the holding companies are the ones that had the bigger issues, but they still stayed public companies in some cases. [00:40:06] S4: If they lose enough value and become very acquirable, then yeah, I guess it makes sense. You can just have a holding company that specializes. There has to be a unifying theme for that holding company. What are they really, really good at? And maybe there's someone who comes along and is like, I'm very good at extracting value and defending shrinking communities. And then that becomes the last bastion of kind of direct, indirect. And then advertisers go there for very specific audiences.
00:40:06 · Saanya Ojha, Akash Pasricha
[00:40:06] S4: If they lose enough value and become very acquirable, then yeah, I guess it makes sense. You can just have a holding company that specializes. There has to be a unifying theme for that holding company. What are they really, really good at? And maybe there's someone who comes along and is like, I'm very good at extracting value and defending shrinking communities. And then that becomes the last bastion of kind of direct, indirect. And then advertisers go there for very specific audiences. [00:40:40] S0: Right. Okay. Well, I'll have to see how it plays out. Saanya, I wanna thank you for coming on. That is Saanya Ojha, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures here on TITV. That does it for today's show. A reminder, we are on this stream Monday through Friday at 10AM Pacific, 1PM Eastern. If you can't make it then, episodes are available on .com, on our YouTube channel, or wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure to follow us on social media, on X, on Instagram, on TikTok, and on LinkedIn. I am already excited for our next show tomorrow. Have a great rest of your Monday. Bye bye for now.