A two-sided market facilitates interactions between multiple interdependent groups of customers. The value of the platform increases as more groups or as more individual members of each group are using it. The two sides usually come from disparate groups, e.g., businesses and private interest groups.
How they do it: Humble Bundle doesn’t develop the games offered on its website itself but rather acts as a marketplace operator. On the one side, there are developers, which provide their games to be included in the offering and on the other side are the customers. Developer’s revenue is directly linked to the success of their game on the website.
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How they do it: Spotify maintains close relationships not only with it’s customers (paying and free users of the Spotify platform), but also with a set of crucial stakeholders, the rights holders of the content. It distributes approximately 70% of total revenue to rights holders, who then pay artists based on their individual agreements.
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How they do it: Especially the hiring functions in LinkedIn function as a two-sided market. The value for both recruiters and candidates increase with the amount of jobs and candidates on the platform.
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How they do it: Google’s search engine operates as a two-sided market, connecting websites and users who search for websites. Google does not provide any content but utilizes data to make sure that users with a specific search query find the website which can best answer their need / search. It also utilizes the data to allow website owners to target the user’s they want to attract on their websites.
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How they do it: Salesforce offers different apps on its AppExchange platform. Customers of Salesforce may purchase access to apps published by third-parties. Thus, it can leverage a two-sided market, connecting its paying customers with paying third-party AppEchange publishers.
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