Market-Making on the Internet

Aggregation was the antithesis of the Web 2.0 promise; the best suppliers could do was either subject themselves to the Aggregator’s terms and try and make the best of it (call it the BuzzFeed strategy) or work to build a direct connection with customers that went around the Aggregators (the New York Times strategy); Twitter, though, may be on the ... See more

The problem is that there are a lot of publications in the world that would like to be supported by subscriptions, and a lot of readers in the world that would prefer to pay for ad-free content, but nobody is making a market. This is where Twitter is making its play.

aggregation has been terrible for ad agencies for the same reason it has been bad for publishers: the more that advertising becomes centralized on Facebook and Google, whether on their sites or on programmatic exchanges, the fewer advertising dollars are available for the inventory that ad agencies used to abstract away for clients.

Market-making is certainly a characteristic of Aggregators; Google, for example, is a one-stop shop for users, advertisers, and content suppliers. What makes Aggregators unique, though, is their infinite scalability, driven by the effectively zero marginal and transactional costs necessary to serve one more user, advertiser, or supplier.

Twitter is taking its user base, which no one publication could realistically reach or monetize on its own, and re-distributing their subscription fee across publications that no one user could ever support individually.

Twitter is acquiring Scroll...

witter could offer one price tier for no ads, and another price tier for getting past paywalls, and perhaps even individual site subscriptions above that.