vs. Sidecar
Uber
Aggregate existing supply
- What it did
- Signed existing licensed drivers instead of owning cars (2010)
- Sidecar
- Pulled first for private cars (2012), on a legal donation model
Aggregator Strategy
What is Aggregator Strategy?
Build a destination users choose, bring suppliers into that experience, and monetize the resulting access or transactions. Thompson distinguishes this control of demand from a platform’s role as a foundation for third-party businesses. The opportunity often arises when distribution and transaction costs fall and supply becomes abundant: value shifts toward the business that attracts and organizes demand.
How Aggregator Strategy works
A useful discovery or transaction experience attracts users; access to those users attracts suppliers and improves the offer. The company captures value through the user relationship. Test supplier alternatives and the cost of attracting demand before claiming durable bargaining power. Thompson’s defining aggregator conditions are a direct user relationship, negligible marginal cost of serving additional users, and a demand-driven supplier network that can lower customer acquisition costs.
How companies won with Aggregator Strategy
From the win chains in Strategy Canon case studies: what the winner did, and what its rival did at the same step.
vs. Trulia
Zillow
Sell local agents access to that audience
- What it did
- Premier Agent subscriptions from October 2008: 26, 2,764, 8,102 agents (2008-10). Rascoff: 'ad budgets follow eyeballs' (2013)
- Trulia
- Sold to franchisors and brokers until they cancelled in the 2008 crash
vs. Barnes & Noble · 1999–2018
Amazon
Open the catalog to outside sellers
- What it did
- Auctions and zShops failed, then Marketplace put sellers on the same product pages: third-party share of units sold rose from 3% (1999) to 17% (2002) to 58% (2018), from more than two million sellers
- Barnes & Noble
- bn.com stayed a books-and-media retailer adding used and out-of-print titles
vs. SingleCare · 2011–14
GoodRx
One search across every discount network's local price
- What it did
- Launched 2011 after the founders searched for Lipitor's price and 'found basically nothing'
- SingleCare
- Founded 2015, four years later; one card whose prices SingleCare negotiated directly with chains for the drugs most often bought with cash
Also tagged: Booking Holdings · Kayak · OpenTable · Spotify · Tripadvisor · Trulia
The question to ask of a company
Why do users come here first, which suppliers seek access to them, and how does the business capture value from organizing that relationship?
Constituent forms
| Form | Per | |
|---|---|---|
| Level 1 aggregator | Thompson | Acquires supply at a cost (Netflix) |
| Level 2 aggregator | Thompson | Supply has transaction costs (Uber, Airbnb) |
| Level 3 aggregator | Thompson | Supply joins at zero cost (Google, Facebook) |
Who names it — 4 of the canon
| Author | What they call it / where it appears |
|---|---|
| Thompson | Aggregators — Aggregation Theory; “A Framework for Regulating Competition on the Internet” (2019) |
| Thompson | Aggregation Theory; aggregators vs. platforms |
| Christensen | The integration layer that captures profit after supply modularizes |
| Porter | Buyer power, concentrated in one intermediary |
Note. This tag identifies the choice to organize suppliers around customer demand. Record enabling industry conditions separately in Arena and test durable demand ownership in Advantage. The level 1–3 variants below preserve Thompson’s 2017 taxonomy; his 2022 “Spotify, Netflix, and Aggregation” revisits it and excludes streaming video under a stricter supply-side definition. State which meaning applies; a subscription service, directory or audience alone does not establish aggregation.