First, numbers would be required to see exactly how the market is &quot;economically upheld&quot; by VCs.<p>Second, I&#x27;m not sure if you&#x27;re being sarcastic, but your example seems poorly chosen. Uber and Lyft live off of venture capital. Even absent Uber&#x2F;Lyft, the transportation market was&#x2F;still is one of the most cartelised around.<p>Third, you could certainly find satisfactory counter-examples where the money &quot;ends up&quot; (money keeps flowing, btw, that&#x27;s why simplistic diagrams aren&#x27;t very interesting) in the hands of a larger pool of companies. But if the point of the article is to tell us that social networks is a highly concentrated industry, that&#x27;s hardly an upvote-worthy revelation.<p>Judging by the language used in the article, it is apparent that the author has a beef with advertising.<p>I&#x27;m glad he can have a lifestyle business sustained by earned advertising he gets with mentions on Hacker News, but it seems a little disingenuous to pretend that can work for all businesses.