The promised land of the singing frog

Promiscuous marketplaces like OpenTable are ones that users need to keep returning to for more options; monogamous marketplaces like Zocdoc and Wyzant are ones that users often try once to find a long term option whom they’ll quickly take off-platform.

Content, however, is not fungible; it is unique not only to a content-creator but to the medium they use. Marketplaces that become content marketplaces win the market because it is impossible to get their individuated content anywhere else.

After a few decades in which giant aggregators have become the dominant marketplaces while original media companies often seem relatively small, this framework is a reminder that the most successful marketplaces are always media marketplaces.

Marketplaces that eliminate pain points—like Coinbase or Uber—can make users meaningfully happier than the incumbent hackable exchange and medallion cabs, but they struggle to make users meaningfully happier than their own clones, the Krakens and the Lyfts.

My own explanation, though, is that it's a question of fungibility. To have a truly winner-takes-all marketplace requires non-fungible supply and, especially, demand.

Another way of seeing the fungibility spectrum, then, is as a measure of how difficult it is to transfer service from one platform to another. As Max Glassman put it in reviewing this argument, “it's all about switching costs… It would be difficult to find our favorite leaders' thoughts in 280 characters elsewhere.”

Let’s start with some twins: Coinbase and Kraken, if you like, or Uber and Lyft. The buyers and sellers on the exchanges are interchangeable for users, as are the taxi drivers and riders. Supply and demand in both cases is fungible: it doesn’t matter who you’re trading with, just that there is someone to complete the transaction.

So if we want to understand why network effects often fail to lead to marketplace monopolies, we should start by considering the Thumbtacks against the Taskrabbits, the Tinders against the Bumbles, and the Upworks against the Fiverrs, all in relentless competition against mirror-image services. These services all have network effects in the traditi... See more

Monogamous, non-fungible marketplaces are terrible business propositions: users will find a specific option that they like and leave the platform to continue with that individual forever. Promiscuous, non-fungible marketplaces, however, are the best business propositions: users will need to continue returning to the platform both to fulfill their i... See more