The New York Times, July 29, 1999: For tech, we’re the gift that keeps on giving. But we get prime!
When was the last time a significant social media network was founded in the United States? And what about a competitive search engine company? An online ad network? And what about a truly wide-ranging e-commerce start-up?
Here are the depressing answers. The social network Snapchat, in 2011. For search, Microsoft’s Bing appeared in 2009, a replacement for its Live Search. I’m drawing a blank on an ad network. With e-commerce, the answer is probably Wayfair, which arrived in 2002, and still has only 1.3% of the market [most retail innovation has been in niche areas, like luggage (Away) or special fashion (The RealReal)].
To put this another way: Facebook and its Instagram unit have close to 50% of the social media market, dwarfing all the other companies in monthly active users tenfold. Google has about 90% of the search market, with Bing and Yahoo dwindling ever further behind by the month. Google and Facebook also suck up 60% of the digital ad spend, with only Amazon moving up aggressively in that fast-growing space. And speaking of Amazon, the retail giant has about 50%t of total e-commerce sales in the United States, with eBay and Walmart at 7% and 4%, respectively.
Two American government agencies — the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission — have finally gotten around to looking into the dead obvious by investigating the market power of big tech companies and whether their dominance in a range of arenas has hurt competition and hindered new start-ups from forming.
