Second, I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but your example seems poorly chosen. Uber and Lyft live off of venture capital. Even absent Uber/Lyft, the transportation market was/still is one of the most cartelised around.

Third, you could certainly find satisfactory counter-examples where the money "ends up" (money keeps flowing, btw, that's why simplistic diagrams aren't very interesting) in the hands of a larger pool of companies. But if the point of the article is to tell us that social networks is a highly concentrated industry, that's hardly an upvote-worthy revelation.

Judging by the language used in the article, it is apparent that the author has a beef with advertising.

I'm glad he can have a lifestyle business sustained by earned advertising he gets with mentions on Hacker News, but it seems a little disingenuous to pretend that can work for all businesses.