Quote:
Originally Posted by JonInMiddleGA
A similar scenario occurred (kind of) with radio & tv advertising.
Once upon a time there were independent brokerages / buying services (various nomenclature) who served as a sort of clearing house. If I needed to buy 20 different TV markets but was short on time, I could reach out to one of those and they'd use their existing contacts to speed up the process. Everything was funneled through them in both directions, they took their cut as the money passed from me (through them) to the stations.
Fast forward through a couple decades and most of those ended up being bought by various combinations of the TV station ownership groups, often in partnership with their own competition (if everybody had similar skin in the game then they'd be less likely to start screwing each other over was the thinking).
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You go a little crazy trying to game these things out. Because you hear about the story of TV stations taking over for the buying services, it occurs to you that instead of Uber and Lyft taking a cut as middle men, that what you should have is the car owners and drivers in a city band together and make their own ride sharing app that they control and get 100% of the profit from.
Then you realize that you just invented Taxi companies, which is the very thing that Uber came in to replace.
Then you go have a drink because nothing makes sense anymore.