Destryoin' Google is at full swing

What's up, Top G-s? Ready to hear that W16 of media briefs roaring?

This is Vixus, the weekly brief covering cool things happening in mediatech, from generative Ai to VR and beyond.

Never underestimate the power of social media.

What's cookin' today:

• Now you can finally make your own show about being a genius opium addict detective.
• If you're gonna kill Google, you gotta be actually better than Google
• The fad of 2023: summariziation apps.

Cue Nirvana. Let's travel back to the 1990s...

The 1990s was a wild time. Heroin addict look was da thing in fashion.

The TV show Friends just got started. And none of the sextet had done plastic surgery yet.

And the internet was in such baby shoes that there was a thing called "browser wars" happening.

Microsoft and Netscape, (+some others) were competing on who will become the go-to browser of the masses.

But inside that war, there was another conflict. Search engine wars.

(Compared to the war in Ukraine, small-boy stuff. Fck Russia, btw)

There was Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, AltaVista, WebCrawler, a lot of less-known names + ofc, a late comer, Google.

Long story short, Google won it.

If you want to read exactly why, go Google it, here are some good pieces. [Delicious read 1, delicious read 2, delicious read 3]

TLDR; Google won because it had a superior experience.

It was sparking fast, it crawled & indexed information in a different way, and it was super duper clean. There were no banner ads. There were no distractions.

It was built to be solely one thing. To be a portal to high-quality information.

Ever since they’ve dominated the search, there have been many Google killers from Bing to Reddit to Tiktok. None of them have really threatened them.

But the launch of ChatGPT seems to have crawled under their skin (It made Google call a "code red" crisis meeting).

And we wonder what's going on there now as ChatGPT will soon integrate with Bing

But a startup called You.com is also trying to be a google killer. (#socute)

They launched in 2021 with the promise of making searching private. And they’ve raised 45 million so far.

But we wonder whether anyone told them that people don’t care about privacy (wink-wink, hint: TikTok)

Now they launched YouChat.

Which is very similar to ChatGPT. (Maybe the privacy angle was a cover after all).

But It claims to be better in a very specific way.

As it solves a big problem ChatGPT has - referring to the source of information.

With YouChat you can still ask questions, write poems, solve code, have fun convos.

But when it pulls information from the web, it can refer you to the sources.

And you can always ask it, “where did you get that information, old sport”

Is this the thing Bing X ChatGPT will strive to do as well?

However, when you go to their home page (you.com) you’ll notice a huge problem.

Something that Google actually solved when they came to the market.

There’s so much going on. And it’s hard to tell what da fck it is.

Marketing fundamentals say that new (innovative) products need to be easily graspable.

So people can put it into a box. You.com seems to be everything.

A search engine, code writer, image generator, and as noisy as Times Square.

You can even shop on the site. Should Bezos be scared?

This is the exact opposite of how Google entered the market.

And you.com doesn’t feel like a search engine or a "portal to information". But like a SaaS tool.

Also, the other use cases don’t seem that good - we tried generating some images, wasn’t in any way better than Dall-e.

They should hone in on what they want to be best at and do that. This is how the greats got started.

So they should do chat with sources.

People want information. They want it faster than ever before.

Currently, you.com is a feature, not a product. And with a bad experience.

But showing the sources where the answers are from might be exactly the thing ChatGPT is missing. (Until their Bing integration?)

Of course, we don’t know what’s in Google’s closet… Let’s hope they release their beast in 2023. Their distribution machine is just massive.

Have you always wanted to play a genius heroin addict detective who dabbles in sassiness and torturing the violin while being high?

Well, grab your iPhone and detective hat, and let’s go.

Now is the time to start making the next Sherlock Holmes movie because Sherlock Holmes is copyright free and in the public domain in the US.

Anyone can publish their own Sherlock adventures.

It will be more exciting than ever to see what will happen because the creator economy is at full speed.

AI is helping anyone write stories, design images, and edit videos. There are numerous easy-to-access distribution channels out there.

We wouldn’t be surprised if there was soon gonna be a Sherlock Holmes TikTok show.

There will definitely be newsletters, like for Moby Dick or an buffet of various creations like happened to the Great Gatsby.

We also bet that fans will experiment more and use this advantage than the usual production companies.

And some of these creations will be bought off of these fans. Not to mention, the fan club for Sherlock is huge, with over 900 Sherlock Holmes societies around the world.

We’d recommend some generative AI tools to tap into that news and turn it into a marketing stunt: "make your own Sherlock Holmes mystery."

Btw, do you know what copyright law expires next year… Mickey Mouse.

Predicting all of that, but at a 10x level. ‍

Corner of ideas: Sherlock Holmes umbrella organization.

So here’s a business idea. Become the umbrella organization for all of those creators.

Sort of like management - publisher - the governing body.

Help them with legal issues, make deals with other creators-publishers, experiment with distribution, marketing, and become the (co-)publisher of their material.

Currently, this is done by Arthur Conan Doyle's heirs at the Conan Doyle foundation, but their world is about to be turned upside down.

And haggling with them is exactly the help all those creators will need.

Do you remember when everyone was building chatbots? Or NFTs? Or AI image creators?

Well, it seems that the fad of 2023 Q1 is AI content summarizers.

Summary writers for youtube videos, podcasts, and your girlfriend's long text rants.

Just in a week, we saw so many of these, and there are probably 30x more out there in the wild.

However, time for the painful truth. The youtube summarizers we tried didn’t work.

Honestly, guys, let's get our shit together, cuz:

But this whole movement is an indication of one clear thing.

Podcasts (and content)that are there solely for transactional (how-to) and ego-patting purposes will be listened less. They’ll be summarized and skimmed.

They'll be turned into listicles in a blink of an eye.

So anyone who wants to make it as a podcaster or a creator should make sure the people watch it for the experience. For the personalities, the delivery, the jokes, and the vibe.

Not just for the information.

People could read the summaries of TV shows instead of watching these, but they don’t.

They want the vibe.

So the standards in self-creation are going up as well.

Corner of ideas: Ai summarizer service with a human layer on top.

One of the podcast summarizing tools, Sumly.Ai, adds a human layer on top of all the summaries.

To avoid publishing gibberish.

We think there’s room for other similar companies in the market, with different mediums, formats, and plates of podcasts covered.

Sumly.Ai is atm very tech broish: summarizing Lex Friedman, Hubermann, or Ferris…

But you could do the same thing for different kind of verticals.

So it wouldn’t be an AI tool, it would be AI assisted platform. And you could monetize via ads or a low monthly fee.

You're a sophisticated creature who just can't get enough? Here's some more

• Europeans, get ready to start taking phone calls and tweeting while in the air. EU to allow the use of phone calls and internet on flights.
• Wall Street calling, was Zuck on the right track afterall? Apple's XR headset leaks
• In 1930, the union of American singers spent the equivalent of $10m on a campaign to stop people from listening to recorded music and watching movies with sound. The same will happen with AI.  
• ChatGPT X Bing coming in March?

Muchas Gracias, adios.

That's a wrap.

-----------------------------------------See ya next week------------------------------------------

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