The basic premise is still the same to me though. You go on booking.com to compare airfare and hotels. You go on lrmdingtree to compare loans.
Of course, they are all marketplaces, but not all markets work the same way. Compare horse auctions to shopping malls… 
I highly recommend Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets by John McMillan (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001T7EJ9Q/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?..
Both booking.com and lrndungtree have done very well for their shareholders. Lendingtree does not have a public competitor I know of but booking.com does. And booking.com’s competitors TripAdvisor and Orbit have not done very well for shareholders. Is there an explanation for booking to have done so much better than its competitors?
Yes! The same reason Google has more than half the search market. It comes under many names. Increasing returns, first mover advantage, network effect, path dependence. Eating places don’t have it, search engines do. It’s in the nature of the business.
You can see in the s-1 if you look at page 86 they say they have powerful network effects that allow them to have reduced cost per quote by 65% between 2014 and 2017.
I read most of the Business section of their 10-K last night. It repeats much of the S-1. One comment in this thread said that they don’t have much repeat business because you only buy a car once every so many years. This is a wrong idea and the 10-K pointed it out. One does not insure cars or houses or health or life. One insures wealth. The car, the house, health, and life are the insurable interests but what you are protecting is your wealth, the cost of replacing the car, the cost of repairing your house, medical expenses, in the case of life, replacing your income stream when you are gone. If someone only had a car to insure I had no interest in their business. If they had a fleet of cars, a house or two, a business, then yes, they had lots of wealth to protect and they were great customers. The 10-K says they store the visitor’s data to facilitate multiple searches for different insurance products. This creates switching costs, why go elsewhere and enter the same data once again? And it also points out that they do have repeat business.
This is the kind of business which, properly done, can be a take most business like Booking and Google.
You can see in the s-1 if you look at page 86 they say they have powerful network effects that allow them to have reduced cost per quote by 65% between 2014 and 2017.
This is the magic of markets! The efficiency of markets is to eliminate all unnecessary profits. One very interesting point made by John McMillan is that the second lowest cost producer in commodities sets the street price. The low cost producer makes a profit, the second lowest cost producer breaks even. All others go broke. But, if you are in the rock business, the distance to the customer trumps the cost of the rock because transport is the cost driver. Rock piles have local advantage. Markets share supply and demand but each one has it very own peculiarities.
I highly recommend reading Reinventing the Bazaar, it is entertaining and educational.
Denny Schlesinger