Amazon started its dot-com-era sprint with what it called its megadeals. It paid tens of millions of dollars in the late 1990s to be the exclusive bookseller on the popular sites of the day like AOL, Yahoo, MSN, and Excite. These sites were called portals, because they were the main entryways to the Web for the new and technically unsophisticated masses. The portals were accustomed to receiving equity stakes for these kinds of deals, but Bezos refused to give that—he was as stingy about handing out stock as he was about allowing employees to fly business-class. Instead, he paid cash and
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partnerships and network effects can py off huge
