Platform
noun
Any website, mobile app, SaaS, or other digital application which allows the public to own accounts that provide data which can be extracted for personal use and/or which acts like a marketplace for businesses or people to peddle wares and services to earn revenue inside of the system using features, tools, and rules provided by the system itself.

“My sister sells her knitted hats with beards on the Etsy platform.”

“Facebook’s platform uses public and private information from accounts to help advertisers target users better.”

“My Uncle pays for his YouTube channel thanks to the Patreon platform.”

Examples of Platforms:

• Amazon
• eBay
• Facebook
• Flippa
• Twitter
• Uber
• Envato
• Patreon
• Twitch.tv
• Fiverr
• Google+

Typically marketplace platforms make profit by taking a small fee from the transaction between two parties. They might also make profit by selling upfront monthly packages to businesses or end users. Sometimes the line between variants of platforms can be cloudy. For example a platform which sells WYSIWYG website development on a monthly subscription but also allows developers to build plugins for their platform and sell them inside of their store. An example of this type of platform is Wix.

Many CMSes are also platforms such as WordPress where their plugin marketplace allows developers to offer free plugins or make money selling plugins to enhance the open source software. Sometimes these platforms spawn subplatforms such as WooCommerce on WordPress.

Most Social Media networks are considered platforms in which users create profiles filled with data that the platforms then sell access to via their own advertising solutions. This includes big networks such as Facebook and Twitter and smaller ones like Imgur and Reddit.

Search Engines are often platforms as well (DuckDuckGo excluded) allowing users to search for queries and then matching them to advertisements contextually in real-time. Google and Bing both heavily encourage users to signup for their platforms and offer both everyday users and website owners various tools and extra features for being a part of their platform.

A website that offers API access to unique data or processes but does not encourage account creation by normal users and does not help people or businesses earn money with a marketplace could still be considered a platform – only one that purely distributes information / processes via the API access. These are very rare as most often API platforms encourage either monetization or user accounts, such as pre-revenue Twitter. If they do not encourage monetization there’s a good chance the API access will be cut off to developers they deem a threat, a good example is post-revenue Twitter and Meerkat.

A system might also be considered a platform if it is a hosting environment with any type of specialty (i.e. Amazon Web Services and Heroku are considered platforms) though often times these are referred to as “hosting platforms” to help distinguish them from the others which are often more user and business facing.

In Video Gaming a platform is typically a device or type of device a video game is played on (i.e. Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo, PC, iOS, Android) and can also include applications built on those devices to sell games or applications built inside of a video game to buy, sell, and trade virtual items or currency (i.e. Steam, Playstation Store, Origin).