When Ben Thompson introduced Aggregation Theory in 2015, it was a critically powerful framework to understand how/why companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon were able to dominate their industries. 

Aggregators succeeded by controlling demand and leveraging marginal costs near zero. The dynamic was straightforward: control user attention, drive distribution, and extract value from suppliers forced to play by the aggregator’s rules. The result: a world where “distribution” no longer meant shelf space or cable channels; it was  algorithmic feeds and app stores all the way down.

Nearly a decade later, Aggregation Theory remains foundational. 

In fact, I’d argue it’s proven so robust that its logic has reshaped tech itself. 

Every successful business with scale as its end goal now aspires to aggregation. In software, marketplaces, media, even productivity tools, the gravitational pull is to become a platform, a hub, a central point of coordination. Aggregation has won. 

But what happens when everyone is an aggregator? 

What breaks when the aggregator advantage becomes universal?

In 2015, becoming an aggregator was a revelation. By 2025, it’s table stakes. Startups pitch themselves as “vertical SaaS aggregators.” Marketplaces pursue aggregation not just of goods but of supply chains, logistics, and payments. Substack aggregates readers for writers. Shopify aggregates independent merchants for buyers. Even productivity suites - Notion, Figma, Airtable - are building ecosystems that aggregate demand and supply of integrations, templates, and workflows.

The pattern is recursive. 

Once you achieve distribution in any market, the next step is aggregation. It’s no longer sufficient to deliver a product; the prize is in controlling the environment around the product. Which leads us to something of a paradox: if every successful company is trying to aggregate, do they cancel each other out? Or does aggregation stop being a strategy and become simply the background condition of the internet economy?

One of the key insights in Aggregation Theory was how aggregators benefit from zero marginal costs for serving an additional user. It’s a dynamic that creates relentless pressure on suppliers, who face commoditization and dependency on aggregator-controlled demand. Ex: Musicians depend on Spotify, writers on Substack, merchants on Amazon. The aggregator captures the customer relationship, while suppliers scramble for visibility within the aggregator’s rules.

But if every layer of the stack is pursuing aggregation, the squeeze multiplies. 

A podcast host may rely on Spotify for distribution but also on Patreon for monetization, Substack for newsletter promotion, and YouTube for video reach. Each platform aggregates in its own domain, extracting rents while eroding supplier margins. The result is fragmentation not in distribution but in control. Suppliers are simultaneously captured by multiple aggregators, none of which fully replace the others. Dependency deepens, but so does complexity.

See where I’m going with this?

The striking feature of the aggregator era = the incompatible overlap in ambition. 

Netflix wants to be a gaming aggregator. Amazon wants to be a healthcare aggregator. Apple wants to aggregate not only apps and music but also payments, fitness, and financial services. Google wants to aggregate attention across search, video, and productivity tools. These overlaps inevitably create friction. The aggregator playbook - scale, lock-in, control demand - works best when uncontested. When aggregators collide, value capture turns into trench warfare.

Both Apple and Meta envision aggregation of developers, creators, and end-users. But the success of one undermines the aggregation potential of the other. Digital aggregation pits ecosystems directly against each other. The zero-sum logic of attention and engagement means one platform’s aggregation dilutes another’s.

Aggregation depends on being perceived as neutral infrastructure. Google Search aggregates the web by promising relevance. Amazon aggregates sellers by promising customer convenience. Facebook aggregated publishers by promising reach. But that neutrality erodes after aggregation becomes universal. Users, regulators, and suppliers recognize the tilt. If every platform is optimizing for capture, the trust that underpins aggregation frays.

Look at the app store debates. 

Apple presented its App Store as a curated, safe marketplace. Now it’s seen as an extractor. Google were the alternative to Apple’s walled gardens. Now they’re looking to ban unsigned apps. Amazon positioned Marketplace as enabling small merchants. Now it’s reliably accused of copying products and privileging its own goods. Aggregation at scale turns neutrality into an illusion, and once the illusion breaks, the political and regulatory backlash follows. 

That backlash itself becomes a structural force limiting aggregation.

In the early years, aggregators benefited from regulatory arbitrage. 

Uber scaled because taxi regulations were fragmented. Airbnb grew by sidestepping hotel zoning laws. Facebook expanded globally without facing broadcast licensing requirements. But as aggregation becomes the norm, regulators adjust. Europe’s Digital Markets Act directly targets aggregator dynamics, imposing obligations on gatekeepers. The U.S. is circling antitrust cases around Amazon and Google. Even in markets like India, regulators are designing policies with aggregation in mind.

Where scale conferred invulnerability, it’s now painting a target - and the very success of aggregation makes it harder to sustain. The irony is that regulatory scrutiny doesn’t kill aggregation as a model so much as it fossilizes it. The incumbents remain dominant, but new entrants face structural hurdles in repeating the same playbook. 

Aggregation becomes a moat. 

Which, I suppose, was always the plan. 

An underappreciated dynamic: aggregation itself is becoming commoditized. 

Ten years ago, building a marketplace or a social platform required novel insights into network effects. But the mechanics are now pretty well codified. Anyone can plug Stripe for payments, AWS for infrastructure, and a pre-built recommendation engine for personalization. 

That commoditization creates an inversion. Instead of aggregation being the disruptive advantage, differentiation shifts back to supply, brand, and niche. Shopify succeeds by empowering merchants with independence. Discord thrives by focusing on community intimacy rather than mass aggregation. In a world of universal aggregators, the counter-position is to be specific, bounded, even small.

Aggregation promised convenience, simplicity, and choice. But choice overload and interface fatigue are real. 

How many aggregator dashboards can a consumer manage? If your groceries are on Instacart, your shows on Netflix, your fitness on Apple, your payments on PayPal, and your communications split between Slack, WhatsApp, and Discord, the experience fractures.

The fatigue creates opportunities for products that lean into clarity rather than control. Tools that integrate across aggregators, or that deliberately refuse to aggregate, may resonate. The rise of single-purpose apps like BeReal or the persistence of platforms like Discourse proves that the human appetite for direct, uncluttered experiences has not disappeared. 

Aggregation maximizes scale, but scale ain’t always what users want.

Where does this leave us? 

If aggregation is the air we breathe, what’s next?

One possibility = meta-aggregation: platforms that aggregate across aggregators. Super apps in Asia like WeChat and Grab are early examples. Musk has pitched X as following a similar plan, but the odds of achieving that goal seem (to be blunt) slim to fuck. Operating systems themselves are candidates for meta-aggregation, stitching together fragmented ecosystems under a single interface. The risk is that meta-aggregation only deepens the cycle, concentrating even more power in even fewer hands.

The alternative is disaggregation. 

Decentralized protocols like Mastodon or Farcaster aspire to invert the aggregator model by making demand and supply coordination peer-to-peer. Whether these efforts can overcome the cold-start problems that aggregators once solved remains very much to be seen. And Mastodon’s had a good many years to proved their viabilityb as it is. 

But the cultural and regulatory winds tell us there’s at least some appetite for disaggregation, even if only as a counterbalance.

Aggregation Theory helped us understand why digital platforms looked nothing like industrial incumbents. And it continues to explain dynamics that define today’s market. What’s changed is the universality of its application. 

The interesting questions turn from “who will aggregate?” to “what breaks when aggregation is universal?”

The answer seems to be: neutrality breaks, supplier margins break, regulatory tolerance breaks, and consumer patience breaks. Aggregation as strategy converges into aggregation as condition.

That’s not the end of the story, but it’s likely the end of aggregation as a secret weapon.

In the post-aggregator economy, the competitive edge has moved elsewhere: in trust, in focus, in resisting the gravitational pull of universal aggregation itself.