Daniel Ek

It's almost impossible to find a single thing we could do that's just universally going to help.

And that naturally creates the constraints that it's more of a one-way door than a two-way door where we can kind of like iterate and invest on it.

So I'm fairly certain that like what you're seeing now in this world of platforms and creator ecosystems is if you asked YouTube like, hey,

If you could redesign the platform right now, would you just make all the same decisions you made about discovery and monetization all over again?

The answer would probably not.

Almost assuredly, no.

Right.

As evident actually by Shorts that works a little bit different on their platform, right?

Yeah.

And they're all different too, because shorts, obviously you have many more potential impressions over a shorter period of time.

And an average YouTube video has been X minutes, and that means more interstitial ads.

And then we have host red ads or the equivalent of sort of more native ads or paid promotional ads that both Instagram and YouTube have.

So we're living in an ecosystem where on the one end,

10, 15 years ago, we were very primitive in terms of monetization.

And today it is very, very different.

And I kind of think about it in a way, like this is not too dissimilar from mom and pop shops, they've sort of like coming up in the US as a cultural norm.

You know, on the one hand, you had physical infrastructure, urbanization driving these kind of things where we both created these mega Walmarts of the world as a direct consequence, but actually the complete opposite was also true.

We had this hyper local thing, et cetera.

And if you think about it today, these mom and pop stores, the ones that are still around, they're hyper distinct in what they're offering.

They're really focused on community in many cases, really knowing your customer.