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.
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?
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.
They attribute this to the scale they reached. If so, this means it will become next to impossible for some other company to come along and duplicate what they’ve done.
Combine the lower cost due to scale and the higher quality leads due to ai, this could change the way insurance is bought and relegate any newcomers to the space to a TripAdvisor compared to EverQuote being the equivalent of booking.com.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1640428/000119312518…