Publishers and the Smiling Curve

Facebook, again, is the extreme example here: the service got started with user-generated content and has continually retrenched over the last few years to have more user-generated content and less professionally produced content; every time they have done so, publishers have cried foul over all of the traffic they were losing. Google, meanwhile, d... See more

The Supplier Differentiation SpectrumConsider the six companies I mentioned above: Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Apple, and Microsoft.The degree of differentiation of tech company suppliers variesThese companies exist on a spectrum in terms of supplier differentiation (and, by extension, supplier power):Facebook has commoditized suppliers more... See more

This chart also gets to the heart of the challenges of being a content publisher: publishing content is expensive, requiring a significant investment in people (journalists, videographers, artists, etc.) or a significant payout to content creators. This leads to lower margins for content publishers relative to content platforms. The New York Times ... See more