1. The Wile E. Coyote Effect

    Image from www.ben-evans.com on 2020-05-07 at 11.44.29 AM.png

    I’ve been looking at this chart a lot over the past few weeks.

    It shows us that print ad budgets were doing just fine all the way though the first decade or more of the consumer internet. There was even a little spike upward for the Dotcom bubble. Then the financial crisis and recession of 2008/9 caused a step change down, but when the crisis was over the budgets didn’t come back. Instead, the market had been reset, and budgets have been falling steadily ever since.

    You might call this the Will E Coyote effect - you’ve run off the cliff, or the cliff has disappeared from under you, but there’s a brief moment while your legs windmill in the air before gravity kicks in. It can take a while for the inevitable to happen, but then, as Lenin pointed out, you get a decade of inevitable in a week.

    1. ​When decades happen​