Читать книгу Media Selling - Warner Charles Dudley - Страница 16

In 2015 Ben Thompson in his “Stratechery” newsletter articulated aggregation theory, a concept that explained the phenomenal success of digital‐era companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Snapchat, Uber, and Airbnb. Thompson wrote:

First, the Internet has made distribution (of digital goods) free, neutralizing the advantage that pre‐Internet distributors leveraged to integrate with suppliers. Secondly, the Internet has made transaction costs zero, making it viable for a distributor to integrate forward with end users/consumers at scale.

This has fundamentally changed the plane of competition: no longer do distributors compete based upon exclusive supplier relationships, with consumers/users an afterthought. Instead, suppliers can be aggregated at scale leaving consumers/users as a first order priority. By extension, this means that the most important factor determining success is the user experience: the best distributors/aggregators/market‐makers win by providing the best experience, which earns them the most consumers/users, which attracts the most suppliers, which enhances the user experience in a virtuous cycle. The result is the shift in value predicted by the Conservation of Attractive Profits.²⁵

Previous incumbents, such as newspapers, book publishers, networks, taxi companies, and hoteliers, all of whom integrated backwards, lose value in favor of aggregators who aggregate modularized suppliers – which they don’t pay for – to consumers/users with whom they have an exclusive relationship at scale.²⁶