[jlukanta]

"Generally speaking, there are only a few ways to make money on the Internet."

And the article goes on claiming that e-commerce and marketplaces, hardware, and ads are those few ways.

This can't be true considering how much money Netflix (subscription), AWS (metered pay), mobile games (IAP) are making.

[xyahoo]

Agreed. This article starts with a hypothesis ("Marissa Mayer bad!"), and then lays out cherry-picked 'facts' and anecdotes around it.

It could as easily have started with "Marissa Mayer great!", and done the same (but with a different set of 'facts' and anecdotes).

[projectramo]

The thrust of his article was not about this, but these are good points.

The three ways of making money -- transaction fee, selling hardware, and selling ads -- exclude just paying for an internet service (where I would call subscription, metered, and IAP different ways for paying for a service).

You could call that a subset of e-commerce except that he defines e-commerce companies as those that "that profit from transactions occurring on their platforms," and uses Amazon, ebay and Uber as examples.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

They did say generally.

Also, they were presumably only talking about consumer web services. AWS doesn't fall into that category.