The TikTokification Trade
kamil@unable
−2.4%
since Oct 6
The idea
I believe consumer products are being TikTokified: endless personalized feeds are replacing search and browse, and that shift is spreading from short-form video into media, commerce, and entertainment. I'm expressing this across three roughly equal sleeves, the platforms that own attention, the ad and commerce engines that monetize feeds, and the infrastructure powering recommendation systems, with a cash reserve kept aside to add on weakness. No single name carries the thesis, this is a multi-year structural hold on the feed itself winning, not any one platform.
What it owns
- The companies that already own the personalized feed and the hours people spend in it. · Meta PlatformsReels and AI-ranked feeds already decide what billions of people see without them searching for anything., AlphabetYouTube and Shorts push it toward feed-first discovery while search erodes, making its recommended-feed consumption critical., SpotifyDiscovery playlists and AI DJ mean most listening starts without a search, lifting engagement and prices., NetflixIts recommendation engine turned choosing into being served what to watch, monetized through an ad tier., RedditIt is moving from people seeking out communities to an algorithmic home feed surfacing them., PinterestIt is a discovery feed that ends in a purchase, with people scrolling ideas they never searched for and buying from them.30%
- Recommendation models are compute-hungry, so the chips, networking and data layer underneath get paid no matter whose feed wins. · NVIDIAEvery feed runs recommendation models that mostly run on its chips, for ranking and inference across consumer platforms., BroadcomIt builds custom chips that Meta, Google and others use to run their feeds more cheaply than on GPUs alone., Taiwan SemiconductorIt manufactures the chips that run feeds, whether NVIDIA or custom ones, making it the chokepoint of infrastructure., Arista NetworksRecommendation systems move enormous amounts of data between chips, and it sells the networking that connects them., Micron TechnologyServing ranked feeds to billions of people requires huge amounts of high-bandwidth memory, its core business., SnowflakeA feed is only as good as the behavioral data behind it, which many companies store and crunch here to personalize products.30%
- The engines that turn algorithmic attention into purchases, for themselves and for everyone else's feed. · AmazonCommerce is shifting from search-and-buy to feed-and-buy through personalized homepages and a growing ad business., AppLovinIt sells the machine that decides which ad lands in whose feed, the monetization layer for algorithmic placement., The Trade DeskIt lets advertisers buy into everyone else's feeds through programmatic placement inside algorithmic content., ShopifyIt gives merchants the rails to sell inside feeds, from TikTok Shop integrations to in-app recommendations., MercadoLibreIt layers a growing ad business and personalized storefronts on the region's dominant marketplace., Sea LimitedShopee shows one of the furthest-along examples of video feed to checkout in one motion.30%
- Cash10%