Platform based businesses such as Uber, Facebook, Google, Airbnb and Amazon continue to do great business, while disrupting other models. A misconception is that these companies are doing well due to their matchmaking capabilities. They do connect the best suited sellers with the ideal fit customers, but there is more to their business model. Beyond matchmaking, these platforms provide enormous amount of business intelligence about what the market really needs. They give genuine insights after analyzing the vast data which they get during their business processes. These insights also help companies to streamline their production and supply while often changing their product altogether due to market feedback. The head of Alibaba has explicitly stated that their business is there for the purpose of helping as many people as possible.

Source: https://hbr.org/2016/08/the-best-platforms-are-more-than-matchmakers