> the value of a human eyeball is going up
There must also be some value in advertising to the "eyeballs" of the AI? Even if they don't (yet) make that much decisions about spending, they do influence human decisions.
The only moat left is money?
161–170 of 398 posts
Re: The only moat left is money?
#162> When creation was hard, skill was the differentiator: you had to actually be good to make something worth showing. Now the barrier is near zero, so you need reach. Reach costs money or it costs years. Probably both. Creation has progressively been getting easier since the invention of the computer, it is not a new phenomena. This naturally pushes the boundary on what needs to be delivered in order to find paying cu…
Something I've noticed a lot with Twitch streamers and YouTubers is that many of them want the outcome and are prepared to do the work, but want some sort of guarantee of success. It's very difficult to really sell to people that you will work very hard for a while and there's absolutely no promise that you'll ever have more than 14 subscribers. That's simply the core risk of entrepreneurship.
Also, as someone who's main source of income is a YouTube channel: there is a type of threshold effect, where your videos are not good enough to watch until one day they suddenly are.
This means that until you reach that threshold, it feels like you're not making progress, cause every video just gets the same result (no views). Even if below the surface, you're slowly inching closer to that moment where your videos will actually be watched.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#163I disagree. I think creativity is still a valid moat. You still need to build good products. Its like a restaurant anyone with some money can open a restaurant but you need to has the creativity to make a good one.
Creativity is a kind of labor. Like all labor, it never earns pay more than once.
Then what are acting and music royalties?
Re: The only moat left is money?
#164> the value of a human eyeball is going up There must also be some value in advertising to the "eyeballs" of the AI? Even if they don't (yet) make that much decisions about spending, they do influence human decisions.
It's the new SEO. Enterprise software vendors are already tailoring their marketing pages and docs to influence AI for when some VP asks their chatbot "which XYZ software should we consider buying?" This is something a coworker is facing at work as we try to leverage AI to speed up market discovery/tool selection work.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#165This is not new. When I started my first company in 2012 it was bootstrapped and getting anyone to pay attention to what I was building was almost impossible. I had to pound the pavement and meet people in person at coffee shops and pitch to get my first few users.
Then when I raised from a16z and had some money in the bank it didn't get any easier. The money didn't help (maybe it wasn't enough). Ad spend or content marketing or paid channels were all hard regardless of the free vs paid.
Maybe I just wasn't good at it.
That was before AI and you had to manually pound the bits into place.
Now with AI yes there are a lot of people shipping a lot of things but humans can tell when someone's put effort into something vs not and the time to traction is still as high as it always was.
Someone should do some analysis on number of things that go "viral" or gain adoption quickly today vs 5 / 10 years ago.
Getting traction has always been hard. Thats just business.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
In addition to that, what they don’t mention is that: 1. Other app stores like Google Play and Steam haven’t seen this rapid rise. 2. There are thousands maybe tens of thousands of apps that are just wrappers calling OpenAI APIs or similar low effort AI apps making up a large percentage of this increase. 3. There are billions of dollars pouring into AI startups and many of them launch an iOS app.
Has steam not seen a rapid rise in AI-asset shovelware? I'm not talking about the AAA or the AA or even the A space (where AI is being incorporated into dev processes with various degrees of both success and low effort slop), I'm talking about the actual bottom of the barrel.
I can’t speak to the quality of all the games released, but in January 2025 there were 1,413 games released on Steam and in January of this year there were 1,448.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#167> The value of human thinking is going down. You probably knew this. The corollary is rarely mentioned: the value of a human eyeball is going up, because there are only so many of them and there are now infinite things that want to be looked at. Hey, so I'm thinking about getting my car washed.. This article reads as overly hyperbolic; cashing in on the AI hysteria. AI derangement.
I am not cashing in on AI hysteria. I am AI hysterical. lol. Kinda joking but kinda not. How do you have chill while the world is crashing down? I’m young so that’s probably part of it, only ~12 years into my career and haven’t experienced too many world defining shifts.
The world is crashing down for a huge variety of reasons, none of which are LLMs stealing jobs or anything like that.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#168I partly agree.
Yes, the entry level is low.
It helps me to gain time on my life, doing other things.
But I do not believe that much that more people are going in. Most non coder people i know will not code a thing.
Most bad student i got will not start to do side projects.
So, yes people wanting to ship something ship more, but for the rest, there is still place.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#169There should be more tax on capital because they are using it against us.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#170> When creation was hard, skill was the differentiator: you had to actually be good to make something worth showing. Now the barrier is near zero, so you need reach. Reach costs money or it costs years. Probably both. Creation has progressively been getting easier since the invention of the computer, it is not a new phenomena. This naturally pushes the boundary on what needs to be delivered in order to find paying cu…
i would argue that reach has already been the biggest limiting factor for the last 10 even 20 years.