👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week's most remarkable stories at the intersection of #ecosystem #innovation and #platform #organisation.
The Long Tail: The Internet and the Business of Niche
There’s one characteristic that many of the most successful internet businesses share: they create more jobs through their platform than the company could ever directly employ. For instance, Shopify has 10,000 employees—but Shopify likely provides the foundation for 10 million jobs by enabling merchants to run and operate a storefront. (There are over 1,000,000 Shopify stores, many with multiple employees.) Or take YouTube, which employs 2,800 people. There are over 306,000 YouTube channels with over 100,000 subscribers (!), meaning there are hundreds of thousands—maybe millions—of creators making a living on YouTube.
The long tail of jobs 👾 - by Rex Woodbury
Fans are the New Creators
In summary, new web3 creative projects are inverting the media creation model: communities of owners are forming around nascent creations, writing their own stories into existence with skin in the game, and distributing them to communities with shared upside, then to broader audiences. Fans become creators, and their own fans become creators, too, resulting in a prismatic assemblage of creation, all powered by a native business model and new funding mechanisms. The end result, hopefully, being the democratization of storytelling and creativity for everyone.
🎨 Prismatic assemblage of creation - in Li's Newsletter
Why YouTube decided to make its own video chip
Similar to most of the silicon that’s used to power data centers, the existence of the Argos chip will go completely unnoticed by the hundreds of millions of people watching YouTube, or using Google’s other video products. Silver said that the company hadn’t observed a response to the VCU’s introduction in any of the markets in which YouTube operates around the world. But that’s not entirely the point. YouTube is decidedly better because it used Google’s custom-built chips to achieve something that would have been completely unthinkable for the earliest companies operating on the internet.
🤖 Software is eating hardware - by Max A. Cherney
Overemployed’s Isaac P: “The days of the employee are dead”
Everyone is now a solo-entrepreneur of their own, everyone can be over-employed and treat themselves as a “single member LLC” or an escort. They work multiple remote jobs and reach financial freedom, pursue life, liberty, happiness sooner than later… The pandemic enabled everyone to do their two jobs from home, and so having to carry around a personal PC or working on a phone when you are in an office or go to your car, take a walk, it’s just a natural progression. I almost thought you have that side hustle, you have to diversify yourself, you should think like a business, businesses in their mind have this one big customer as their one source of income… Why don’t we just blow this up and just do it? The days of the employee is dead, that social contract has been long dead.
🤹♂️ Juggling multiple jobs - by Danny in the Valley
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