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One of the advances in our understanding of two-sided markets or platforms is the notion of a competitive bottleneck. This arises in the context of competing platforms when a group on one side of the market always multihomes; that is, they pay to access each platform. More strongly, they pay to access and use any one platform independently of what they are doing on other platforms. This has a significant impact on the nature of competition between platforms. If one side always multi-homes then it is, in some sense, captured by each platform. The platform can act like a monopolist with respect to those customers. However, this does not eliminate competition as, by the very nature of two-sided markets, the level of activity on the other side of the market impacts on the quality of the product served to the other. In this situation, platforms may compete for increased use on one side of the market in order to increase the supply and quality of the product they can provide to captured customers.

This model is pervasive in two-sided markets involving advertisers. The canonical model of media economics (Anderson and Coate, 2005) has, as its baseline, a model where each advertiser wants to communicate to each broadcast viewer. Consequently, competing broadcasters can charge advertisers a monopoly price for access to any given viewer. The broadcasters