From the course: Strategic Partnerships: Ecosystems and Platforms

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Managing multi-sided platforms

Managing multi-sided platforms

From the course: Strategic Partnerships: Ecosystems and Platforms

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Managing multi-sided platforms

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- If you decide to use a digital platform as a way to organize the relationships in your ecosystem, you need to think about the design of that platform. And there are three logical questions you need to ask here. The first is, how many sides does this platform have? Think about it as a table. Is it a table with one side and everybody's sitting on one side and talking to each other? Or is it a table with two sides where they're talking across the table? Or even three or more sides? For example, Facebook and Twitter are one-sided platforms. Everyone's sitting on one side of the table and talking to each other. eBay is a two-sided platform. There are buyers and there are sellers. Advertising is a special case. It often gets brought in as an additional side because the network has grown so big that it becomes attractive to advertisers, and this is one way that the platform designers can capture some of that value of the network. The design of this table, one-sided, two-sided, etc., also…

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