In the last several years, there’s been a lot of talk about wealth inequality in this country today. There’s been a lot to back that up. Apparently, the online business is hardly an exception.
According to a USA Today article, ?five Internet companies made an overwhelmingly 70% of online profits so far in 2015. Amazon comes in first. Amazon alone raked in a third of all our Internet dollars this year. Google/Alphabet came in a respectable second. This leading online conglomerate made off with nearly one fourth of our online business. Online bidding giant Ebay placed third. Social media outlet Facebook placed fourth. ?Guess who placed number five? It’s wasn’t Apple. It wasn’t Walmart. It was Liberty Interactive, a media conglomerate that gives us cable shopping networks like QVC and online invitation sites like Evite. But these five companies made the majority of online wealth. In fact, Amazon and Alphabet/Google alone have 57% of all our online wealth. Unfortunately, that leaves little profit for smaller online companies, even for ones that aren’t very small at all. Coupon provider Groupon is one of the top 20 largest Internet based company in the world. Yet they lost over half their revenue in the last year alone. Groupon stocks are trading only at around $3 a share.
Groupon is the one of the largest Internet companies today, and even they’re struggling. So you can only imagine how small online companies are doing, or not doing. You see the problem here? When five conglomerates own most of the wealth, that makes it nearly impossible for others to even survive. And it discourages people from starting an online business, doing for themselves, and achieving the American dream. I can see why there are mergers going on every time I look around. While it might save the smaller entity, it makes the big guys even bigger. The smaller entity feels it has no choice but to merge. So the cycle continues. When our ancestors and forefathers came up with free market enterprise, is this what they had in mind? And what can be done about it?