Platforms, Ecosystems, and Aggregators

Ben Thompson described this phenomenon in his signature aggregation theory. Pre-internet, you captured profits by controlling supply. Now, post-internet, you capture profits by aggregating demand.

This is one key insight in Ben Thompson’s famous Aggregation Theory: modern marketplaces get their power from aggregating the demand side. And that’s a much better position than the old way of trying to own the supply side.

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.

A subtext to last week’s article, Tech’s Two Philosophies, was the idea that there is a difference between Aggregators and Platforms; this was the key section:It is no accident that Apple and Microsoft, the two “bicycle of the mind” companies, were founded only a year apart, and for decades had broadly similar business models: sure, Microsoft licen... See more

Because aggregators deal with digital goods, there is an abundance of supply; that means users reap value through discovery and curation, and most aggregators get started by delivering superior discovery.

What followed was probably my first clear articulation of Aggregation Theory, albeit without the name. The point about effectively infinite competition, though, is a critical one. Neither reach nor timeliness were differentiators, but rather commodities; the companies that dominated on the Internet were those — Google and Facebook in particular — t... See more