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Benedict Evans nails it on chatbot (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini) uses weekly versus daily as daily is what truly indicates a sticky user. Old habits have yet to break…but will.
“But however these questions turn out, it’s important to remember that if you use five different LLMs every day, and haven’t done a Google search this year, and all your friends are the same… then you’re in a bubble, for now. ”
Interestingly Meta stopped using the method as soon as this news was released.
“We disclose a novel tracking method by Meta and Yandex potentially affecting billions of Android users. We found that native Android apps—including Facebook, Instagram, and several Yandex apps including Maps and Browser—silently listen on fixed local ports for tracking purposes.
These native Android apps receive browsers’ metadata, cookies and commands from the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica scripts embedded on thousands of web sites. These JavaScripts load on users’ mobile browsers and silently connect with native apps running on the same device through localhost sockets. As native apps access programatically device identifiers like the Android Advertising ID (AAID) or handle user identities as in the case of Meta apps, this method effectively allows these organizations to link mobile browsing sessions and web cookies to user identities, hence de-anonymizing users’ visiting sites embedding their scripts.
This web-to-app ID sharing method bypasses typical privacy protections such as clearing cookies, Incognito Mode and Android’s permission controls. Worse, it opens the door for potentially malicious apps eavesdropping on users’ web activity.”
Matthew Prince recently sat down with David Rubenstein for an interview, during which the Cloudflare CEO highlighted how the internet’s core business model—search—is undergoing rapid transformation.
“And if you look back 10 years ago, if you did a search on Google you got back a list of 10 blue links. And we have data on how Google processed those 10 blue links. And the answer was that for every two pages of a website that Google scraped they would send you one visitor, right? So scrape two pages, get one visitor. And that was the trade.”
The amount of scraping Google does hasn’t changed but that rate of 2 to 1 is now 6 to 1.
“What’s changed? The answer is that today, 75 percent of the queries that get put into Google get answered without you leaving Google, get answered on that page. So if you want to ask, when did David Rubenstein start Carlyle? About 10 years ago it would take you to maybe a Wikipedia page or something else. Today, the answer comes up right on the page, and you don’t have to go anywhere else.”
Without the click to the source, the creators stop making the content.
“So it was 2:1 10 years ago for Google. It’s 6:1 today. What do you think it is for OpenAI? 250:1. What do you think it is for Anthropic? 6,000:1, right?
And so the business model of the web can’t survive unless there’s some change, because more and more the answers to the questions that you ask won’t lead you to the original source, it will be some derivative of that source. And if content creators can’t derive value from what they’re doing, then they’re not going to create original content.”
Apple: Google is no longer seeing growth.
“Cue also revealed that the number of searches through Safari fell for the first time ever in April, suggesting users are looking to AI sources as alternative ways to find information.”
Google: Yes we are.
“We continue to see overall query growth in Search. That includes an increase in total queries coming from Apple’s devices and platforms. More generally, as we enhance Search with new features, people are seeing that Google Search is more useful for more of their queries — and they’re accessing it for new things and in new ways, whether from browsers or the Google app, using their voice or Google Lens.”
It is well known Apple is earning billions off of Google for being the Safari default search engine. Mozilla is no different.
“Mozilla earned $570 million in revenue last year, 85% of which came from Google as a result of a deal Mozilla has to share ad revenue from Google search queries coming via Mozilla’s Firefox browser, the chief financial officer of the internet nonprofit testified on Friday.”
Opera is also no different. Opera indicated that 40% of their revenue came from Google in 2024.
Just as the US Department of Justice seeks to eliminate default search deals, Gemini is making its way onto iOS and ads are making their way into Google chatbots.
One thing is clear: Many are benefiting from the “default.”
Back again for another quarter from the toll booth of eCommerce: Amazon. Sales grew at their slowest pace since Q1 2023, while the Services segment recorded the weakest growth in company history. Forward guidance highlighted continued uncertainty, stating that ‘our results are inherently unpredictable and may be materially affected by many factors, such as…tariff and trade policies…’ Despite sluggish top-line growth, both profits and margins improved significantly year over year and sequentially. While revenue growth was muted, profitability remains on an upward trajectory. Amazon did not “buy” this quarter.
Service sales continue to outpace the product sales yet sales clearly has slowed versus prior quarterly growth rates.
In previous quarters, Amazon’s sales growth was primarily driven by Advertising and Third-party Seller Services. This quarter, while Third-party Seller Services still contributed 17% to total revenue growth, the largest drivers were AWS and Online Stores, accounting for 34% and 22% of the growth, respectively.
Online sales made up just 37% of total revenue, reflecting Amazon’s strategic shift toward more profitable segments and large-scale vendors. This focus was further supported by strong growth in AWS and Advertising. Notably, Third-party Seller Services recorded their slowest growth rate since being reported as a separate line item. Despite currency exchange headwinds and higher-than-expected capital expenditures for 2025, the quarter stood out for its strong profitability.
Bottom Line: Several themes from last quarter persist: AWS remains a consistent growth engine, while Seller Central growth appears to be plateauing. Amazon continues to emphasize Vendor Central, prioritizing net PPM performance over vendor size, with a strong focus on brand strength. We continue to advocate for a hybrid approach that leverages both 1P (Vendor Central) and 3P (Seller Central) models to maintain operational flexibility and maximize profitability.
Disclosure: I have a small personal position in Robinhood common stock, positions in and out of Robinhood started in July 2024. I use the platform for trading and use their credit card.
Robinhood announced another quarter of earnings this evening. Prior overviews are here and here.
Assets Under Custody/Net Deposits - Assets saw an increase of 70% in the latest quarter versus last year. A significant portion of the increase was due to TradePMR acqusition to offset lower overall values and limited slower crypto growth.
Gold Stickiness - Prior quarter was 10.5%, latest quarter was 12.4% with 3.19 million Gold subscribers. The subscriber base continues to grow and that stickiness leads to higher activity and lower churn. Note that the credit card is now up from 100k subs to over 200k subs this quarter. The CFO noted they will continue to grow credit card subs yet will do so with a “measured” approach.
Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) Growth - Whilst the average is down slightly quarter over quarter, the yearly growth figures remain incredibly healthy.
Some other stats:
Robinhood Strategies was recently launched and has 40,000 users and $100mm in assets thus far.
Futures traded 4.5mm contracts in April alone, more than all of Q1, 1billion in last 6 months and believe this is in early stages.
Bottom Line: Though the trading wasn’t as robust specifically in crypto this quarter and an acquisition assisted the business in meeting the numbers, Robinhood continues to drive industry change and build complementary businesses that grow stickiness. No reason not to remain long in my opinion.
Amazon clearly has the content. Here comes the hardware and software. Would assume Amazon seeks a key partner to run their TVs off the software very soon. There aren’t many players that aren’t currently using Google or their own legacy OS. Even Walmart has their Vizio play for TVs.
“Amazon continues to pursue a transition away from Android for its TV hardware: The company plans to release a first TV streaming device powered by its still-unannounced Vega OS later this year and has been courting major publishers to bring their apps to the platform, I’ve been able to confirm with sources familiar with the company’s plans as well as through a number of leaks.”
Despite the ad spend of Temu and Shein dropping, Bloomberg is reporting of stockpiling by customers leading to a strong year over year sales gains for Temu and Shein.
In parallel, it seems that customers are seeking purchases direct from factories with Taobao entering the top 5 within app stores.
Whether it’s tariffs, de minimis exclusions, or emerging apps, many customers will continue to enjoy the thrill of the hunt and actively seek out a deal.
As the tariff news continues, looks as though Temu and Shein are not only indicating a price increase but also aggressively pulling back on advertising on Google and TikTok. Some reports have come out that Google Shopping is completely turned off by Temu. Reports of up to 10% of Facebook and Instagram ad revenue was from Temu.
Some of these charts are staggering:
Bloomberg’s feature piece this month is all about the changes underway at Google to stem the slow bleeding of query searches to ChatGPT. The focus of keeping the queries on Google as opposed to pushing to a website or advertiser.
I found this quote from creators and publishers to be the most interesting and comprehensive:
“Something they told us in that meeting was to never expect to go back to our old levels of traffic,” she says, “because search has changed.”
Here comes OpenAI/ChatGPT. The fight for defaults in both search and assistants is heating up.
We know that ChatGPT is the most sticky and now the offerings are being made available on iOS for the default search engine (currently Google). Although the default search engine change has been available for quite some time, the choices of Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia aren’t the most compelling alternatives. This offering is also a bit more technical and likely won’t lead to widespread updates from users until the selection process is easier or Apple shifts away from Google. Unlikely until OpenAI can outspend Google to the tune of $20 billion plus for the default luxury.
Don’t think that OpenAI is stopping there. Android now provides the ability to change your default assistant from Google to ChatGPT as well.
Latest views Robinhood ($HOOD) stock are here but company provided a preview into how Q1 is shaping up.
“Gold Subscribers have reached 3.1 million, up over 400 thousand this year and representing 12% adoption relative to our Funded Customer base
Net Deposits in Q1 have already surpassed $10 billion, marking our fifth straight quarter of over $10 billion in Net Deposits”
The 3.1 million subscribers is up from 2.6 million reported last quarter at 10.5%. As for net deposits, last Q1 net deposit totaled 11.2 billion. The CEO also mentioned the Robinhood credit card now numbers >100,000 cardholders but will be “getting to multiples this year.” Sounds a bit lite in deposits but the stickiness factor clearly is there and growing.
Replay is here.
Gap clearly hit all the high notes Wall Street needed to hear: Comp sales improvements, higher year over year earnings and minimal tariff impact.
“For the fourth quarter, Gap posted a profit of $206 million, or 54 cents a share, compared with $185 million, or 49 cents a share, for the same period a year earlier. Analysts had forecast per-share earnings of 36 cents.
Meanwhile, comparable sales rose 3% after Banana Republic returned to growth during the quarter. Overall, Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy logged gains of 7%, 4% and 3% in comparable sales, respectively, offsetting a 2% decline from Athleta.
The company said its exposure to tariffs is “minimal.”
“We currently have less than 10% of our product coming from China and less than 1% from Canada and Mexico,” O’Connell said.”
However, we must keep in mind that sales are not growing. Yet.
“Quarterly revenue fell 3.5% to $4.15 billion, but came in ahead of Wall Street expectations for $4.07 billion, according to FactSet.
Looking ahead, Gap said it projects first-quarter sales to be flat to up slightly and full-year sales to rise between 1% and 2%. Analysts polled by FactSet had forecast first-quarter sales to grow around 1.5% and full-year sales to rise around 1.7%.”
Quite impressive. If continued comp sales increases happen, store closures are minimized and sales flip to positive, this is worth a bet despite being range bound for well over a year.
Disclosure: Long common stock, initial position started February 11 and accumulating.
Why the new position? Building a huge moat with a broad offering leveraging 1st party data with massive addressable market:
Market Leader - SimilarWeb plays in all the hottest sectors and arguably provides the most compelling aggregated datasets available. Within eCommerce, our firm uses both the Web and the Shopper suite to gauge where traffic comes from and the size of competitive brands. SimilarWeb collects data via extensions but also has strategic data sharing agreements with major players like Amazon.
2. Peak to Trough Drop - SimilarWeb announced weak guidance saying they are further investing into AI enabled offerings. The earnings also missed expectations which resulted in a 47% peak to trough drop in calendar year 2024. With the size of the addressable market and the compelling datasets SimilarWeb provides, I believe this drop has resulted in a compelling value.
3. Acquisition Target - With SimilarWeb’s market cap of ~$780mm on most recent trading, this could easily be a tuck-in acquisition for some of the larger players. SimilarWeb’s access to 1st party data is a clear differentiator for a major agency group or analytics firm.
Bottom line: Catching this falling knife is one worth taking a shot on. This could trade down into the $8’s but worthy of starting to accumulate at this point.
Disclosure: I have a personal position in Robinhood common stock.
Since I previously wrote about Robinhood in July 2024, the stock has seen a 126% increase. Despite the dramatic rise, I still find the company to have significant growth ahead. There were a few points I outlined in July that I thought were worth checking in on:
Assets Under Custody/Net Deposits - Assets saw an increase of 88% in the latest quarter versus last year. A significant portion of the increase was due to higher equity and crypto valuations BUT overall net deposits are up 42% on an annualized basis.
2. Gold Stickiness - In Q4 of 2023, the Gold subscription rate was 6.1%. In the latest quarter, Gold subscriptions as a percent of funded accounts was 10.5%. The platform continues to become a sticky one to leave as the retirement accounts grow.
3. Crypto Reliance - The one major callout of the quarter was the increased reliance on crypto to drive the revenues and EBITDA. In Q4 2023, crypto accounted for 21% of the overall revenues versus the latest quarter exploding to 53%.
Clearly the growth story remains intact. However, the stock truly remains a crypto proxy until we see total revenues via options, equity and other means significantly exceed that of crypto. Regardless, there is more left in this one and I continue to bullishly hold.
Zelle, the payments network run by banks-owned Early Warning Services, crossed $1 trillion in total volumes last year, which it said was the most ever for a peer-to-peer platform.
The firm said Wednesday that its user base jumped 12% to 151 million accounts in 2024, and that the total dollars sent on the platform jumped 27% from the year earlier.
Absolutely wild scale. Compare this to PayPal’s $400 billion in 2024.
A recent report from Authoritas points out how volatile a Google organic search ranking is vs AI Overview ranking is. The study show that over 70% of the AI rankings changed over 13 weeks which compares to organic Google search being 55%:
AI Overview ranking volatility score: 0.68 (8 weeks), 0.73 (13 weeks)
Google Search organic ranking volatility score: 0.49 (8 weeks), 0.55 (13 weeks)
Additionally, websites within the top 10 weren’t automatically given AI Overview privledges automatically:
60% of the time, pages ranking in the top 10 appear in AI Overviews.
40% of the time, AI Overviews rank a webpage that doesn’t appear in the top 10 of Google organic search.
Bottom line: SEO has two layers: Search and AI Overviews.
Amazon has been clearly pushing Buy With Prime. And they just clearly landed their largest fish…
With Buy with Prime, Prime members can shop directly from thousands of brands’ online stores using the shopping benefits they already know and love—including fast, free delivery, easy returns, and 24/7 shopper support.
How soon before every site has a Buy With Prime checkout button similar to Apple Pay? You will be surprised. The fulfillment network is just that compelling.
Here are some key trends we’ve been tracking over the past few weeks with accompanying charts below:
Temu & Shein Turbulence: Sales for Temu and Shein dropped between 16% and 41% over a five-day period starting February 5, following the removal of a duty exemption on their small parcel shipments by the U.S. government. While the ban was later reversed, the sheer volume of Section 321 shipments remains a major force in cross-border eCommerce.
Retail Sales Slowdown: January saw the steepest retail sales decline in two years, with a 0.9% dip (not adjusted for inflation). The likely culprit? Consumers maxing out credit cards in December after stronger-than-expected holiday spending. That said, auto sales, food & beverage/restaurants, and health & personal care stores were bright spots.
Walmart’s Momentum: Walmart continues to outperform and gaining share in higher-income households, with an 83% stock gain over the past year. Its success is largely driven by Walmart+, an expanding 3P marketplace, and an aggressive pricing strategy (-11% vs. competitors). The retailer has also perfected its Wall Street messaging, further solidifying its position.
