This is a major problem for a lot of digital businesses. Consider the following platforms that deliver vast quantities of consumer have alternatives which are

This is a major problem for a lot of digital businesses. Consider the following platforms that deliver vast quantities of consumer have alternatives which are tiny in market size or severely lacking: -Google Adwords, Adcenter delivers a fraction of the traffic with continual quality issues -Google's organic search traffic. Encyclopedias could be filled with stories of companies that built large businesses around Google's targeted free traffic, and flopped. -Facebook, no meaningful alternatives in size and scope. -eBay, any other giant auction market? -Craigslist, I can't think of an alternative to this either. -App Store, alternative being Cydia, not a great one since all of your customers have to "break" their phones. -Google Play, a fractured market of disappointing alternatives such as Amazon's Appstore. It is easy to say, just diversify your source of customers -- but that is very hard to do due to numerous reasons. In this particular case the platform (etsy) user discovered these pitfalls early on. Often companies don't discover this until they've borrowed or raised millions of dollars. In some circumstances, the product itself is platform dependent (App Store or a Facebook social game.) Irregardless of the dependance, business owners and employees develop expert knowledge about the particular platform by necessity and shear time spent navigating potential and existing shortfalls. If they manage to succeed, that particular platform delivers huge amounts of users in a very addicting manner. Investing time in an alternative is unlikely to result in the same volume and value users of users because the actual business model of the company was molded around that user platform's uniqueness! iOS users are different than Android users. A user that arrives through a Facebook ad is very different from a user that performed a search on Google. (By the way, that is usually the root of the stories that X platform/traffic/advertising is crap.) I propose a new executive job title, Chief Platform Dependance Officer. This is a very critical topic to every start up and internet business requiring a steady stream of mass market consumers (more market dependent for b2b.)