Disintermediation is the removal of intermediaries in a supply chain, eliminating ‘middle men’ such that sellers can deal directly with buyers. This can reduce the cost to consumer of various goods and increase the diversity to those goods. Companies like Walmart effectively used this strategy to eliminate steps between the manufacturer and buyer and leave only one intermediary - Walmart. With the move to eCommerce, many speculated that this would lead to further unbundling and disintermediation as the manufacturers like P&G or Levi’s could sell directly to customers. But new intermediaries like Amazon emerged to dominate the landscape building on the high cost of shipping small items and providing quality customer service.

What then is the story of digital goods? TV, Movies, Books, Magazines? Well, all of these categories still have a majority of their revenues and distribution coming...

Even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation. When a platform is self-service, even the improbable ideas can get tried, because there’s no expert gatekeeper ready to say “that will never work!” And guess what – many of those improbable ideas do work, and society is the beneficiary of that diversity. - Jeff Bezos

The rise of the digital exclusive isn’t just about getting more content from existing content creators like Justin Timberlake, it has led to a massive democratization in the content economy where more people can now afford to create a real career from professional content creation by going digital. The low-cost of listing content for sale and distributing it in digital marketplaces has led to a crumbling of the model where gatekeepers in music, books curate content that they think is going to be successful. This has been replaced by self-publishing where content is listed for...