Classroom Companion: Business

10.4 
 Business Ecosystem and MSPs
One generic model for MSPs consists of six types of stakeholders in addition to the 
platform itself: content providers, advertisers, developers, professionals, merchants, 
and consumers (Gautier & Lemesch, 
2020
). A platform may offer services to all six 
categories or to only some of them. Similarly, several stakeholders belonging to the 
same category receiving similar or different services from the platform may be con-
nected to the platform so that the overall ecosystem of the MSP may be overly 
complex. The configuration is shown in 
.
Fig. 
10.5
.
Content providers may use the platform for streaming of media (Spotify), offer-
ing specialized content to certain user groups (e.g., via Facebook), production and 
publishing of digital content (e.g., Google’s YouTube and Amazon’s Kindle), and 
support of video games (Facebook).
Advertisers use the platform for marketing, promotion, campaigns, publicity, 
and targeted and personalized advertisements, usually based on information the 
platform has gathered about each individual customer. This is a primary business 
of, for example, Facebook and Google.
Developers use the platform to develop new services or goods, most notably, 
apps for Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store.
Professionals are companies or organization receiving services that are used in 
their own production of digital or physical goods, for example, cloud computing, 
production of statistics (e.g., based on user data from Facebook, Google, or 
Amazon), online accounting support, collaboration services (e.g., iWork from 
Apple), document sharing, backup and security services (e.g., WorkDocs from 
Amazon), and physical or digital delivery services.
 
Chapter 10 · Multisided Platforms

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Merchants use the platform for online shopping and payment of both physical 
and digital goods.
Consumers are the end users of digital services using smartphones, tablets, and 
other computers to access and process the information, or they are the receivers of 
physical goods ordered over a digital platform.