> There can be at most one new successful dating site every year, which the 30B$ match group can buy out for 300M$.
Then why aren't they asking for more money? Match Group to maintain their $30B enterprise has to buy you out or you by being a non-ruined dating site will destroy their entire company by out-competing them. That should be worth substantially more than 1% of the company. (It also seems to be that it is; Tinder got $3B.)
Match Group owns more than 45 subsidiaries. Obviously the size of the network necessary to be viable would support more than one other challenger. But if there were 15 each of size similar to their own subsidiaries, they'd still have to buy all of them or whichever ones they didn't buy would continue to eat their market share by being non-ruined, and then have to be bought for a higher price later.
I am not really sure where you are going with this, but the reality speaks for itself.
Match makes shitty products optimized for revenue. Good dating products optimized for users have low revenue and valuation. Match acquires virtually all of them and keeps its monopoly alive and thriving.
The premise isn't that someone with a lot of money can't buy up all the existing participants in a given market. It's that if they do, new competitors will keep appearing. Which we see happening.
The question is, how does that turn out? The theory says people should keep creating dating products to make Match buy, because it costs less to do than they have to pay. That doesn't mean it happens instantaneously. It doesn't mean they can't buy some of them. But it's an evolutionary process. They buy the ones they can buy, until one shows up they can't. Maybe because there are too many of them. Maybe one gets too big too fast. Maybe the owners are some stubborn purists who refuse to sell. It hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it won't.
Apparently Facebook is getting into the dating game. They already have the network effect and Match doesn't have the money to buy them. Facebook sucks, but now where's your monopoly?
You are arguing using a hypothetical future which doesn't even remotely exist.
And what's to stop FB dating from sucking. So the final solution is to replace one monopoly with an even bigger one? That's just talking out of both sides of the mouth.
Then why aren't they asking for more money? Match Group to maintain their $30B enterprise has to buy you out or you by being a non-ruined dating site will destroy their entire company by out-competing them. That should be worth substantially more than 1% of the company. (It also seems to be that it is; Tinder got $3B.)
Match Group owns more than 45 subsidiaries. Obviously the size of the network necessary to be viable would support more than one other challenger. But if there were 15 each of size similar to their own subsidiaries, they'd still have to buy all of them or whichever ones they didn't buy would continue to eat their market share by being non-ruined, and then have to be bought for a higher price later.