Distribution Is King

“Content is king” became a cliche because it was the hallmark of the media business. Without great content, not much else matters. But the platform and scale era scrambled that. Distribution became the gamechanger. Publications had BuzzFeed envy. By the same token, media’s indirect business models -- content in some publishing organizations can be ... See more

"All parts of our economy were previously based on scarcity. In almost every case, that scarcity has disappeared. The way you win on the internet is to be the starting place where people go - Google, Facebook, these aggregators - or you're highly differentiated and you leverage the fact that you have zero distribution to reach anyone."

The fundamental disruption of the Internet has been to turn this dynamic on its head. 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 integr... See more