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Many are questioning whether Alphabet (owner of Google), Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon have become so big they are impacting functional competition in the markets they dominate. Another question is whether these organizations have simply become so big that they now constitute a hazard to society. These companies have such a massive number of people on their platforms and generate so much revenue, that their actions impact entire groups of people. They have a revenue stream that is bigger than that of many countries. Complimenting this is their unprecedented dominance in so many aspects of our technological existence; that they control what we see, how we feel and what we (think we) want. As individuals and societies we are now completely reliant on technology; and the future promises much more tech some obvious but a lot more of the subtle type. The big-5 collect data about every miniscule action we perform. They consolidate information from multiple sources they own, combini...

Part of the process of surviving a business is to promote it. You’ve put time, money and effort to grow it to its current state and you would like to retain (and ideally improve) on the growth rate. You’ve come to realise that the internet is another potential income stream and you need to cultivate and grow it. Each lead enforces your belief that a web presence is essential and you’ve decided to invest in growing this business branch. You consider setting up your online business on Facebook. After all you spend a considerable amount of time reading (and liking) posts of others. The Facebook like and thumbs up logo adorns every leaflet, brochure and shop window. According to Wikipedia, Facebook has more than 2 billion active monthly users. If you manage to tap into 0.01% (or even 0.001%) of this population it would shoot your sales off all your existing charts. Another interesting property of Facebook is that it is free. This fits quite nicely into your notion that everything on th...

Companies that are active on the internet do so because they hope that this medium will allow them to have a positive impact on their revenue stream. A large majority of companies use the internet as a point of presence like a virtual showcase or trade directory to highlight their goods and services. They setup a static or semi static website with an “About Us”, “Our Products/Services” and “Contact us” pages. Their internet presence is an economical (half-hearted?) way to justify a WWW address on the business card and it looks nice with the matching email address. Then there are companies that are out to actively monetise. They are using the internet as a major revenue stream. Some organisation’s revenue source is uniquely through internet activities. This article focuses on these organisations. Internet monetization can be categorised as follows: 1. Direct sales of goods and services. This model mimics the model in which the client “picks” a product or service off a shelf and p...