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Brief
Ben Thompson pioneered the idea of "paying for information from an individual" with his popular website Stratechery. Uniquely able to cut through noise of business world.
Date added
Apr 22, 2020 7:31 PM
Edited
Jul 3, 2021 4:36 PM
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Stratechery is what's good.
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Notable works by Ben Thompson for Stratechery
Stratechery
Aggregation Theory
Ben coined Aggregation Theory after realizing that three successive articles about Airbnb, Netflix, and why web pages suck all had a common thread, forming an unintentional series.
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 commoditized 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.
