I clearly remember the newspaper industry doing a survey in the late nineties showing that the Internet wasn't materially hurting their business. Then sometime after 2003 the industry fell off a cliff.
In Portugal, it seems to be coming from the rental market. In the sense that there's been an increase in tourism and the increased demand for short-term accommodation is being fulfilled with properties which were previously for longer rentals.
This has happened in Ireland, and especially Dublin as well. With rents increasing by 10% per year, AirBnB is blamed by some for reducing the stock of privately rented accomodation.
Netflix used to be a unicorn at one time. It didn't primarily expand the rental market to become a unicorn, it rather rapidly destroyed Blockbuster and thousands of other rental stores by providing a better service. If it was primarily expanding that market, Blockbuster would still be around. Today it's not expanding total TV viewing time, it's proceeding to harm cable, tv networks, traditional tv programming, ESPN, HBO, etc etc.
Tesla - also once a unicorn - isn't expanding the automobile market. They've been directly taking sales from BMW, Mercedes, Porsche, Lexus, Audi, etc. The success of the S sedan is coming out of the high end luxury car sales segment. Their 3 sedan will continue that process. That's why those other companies are so freaked out by Tesla's arrival and relative success. If Tesla were primarily expanding the market and not stealing market share, the competition wouldn't be reacting the way they are.
Just think for a second about countries and cities which did not have taxis.
Which countries and cities didn't have taxis before Uber?
In the 6 months I spent in Lyon (2nd city from France), I only saw a taxi once.
I searched the internet for "taxis in France" and generally get the impression that "Rates in Paris are different from the rest of France. ... There are four main tariffs for taxis outside Paris."[1]
This[2] article claims a "nationwide protest against Uber", which would seem odd for, as you would have us believe, a nation without taxis.
1. http://www.expatfocus.com/expatriate-france-taxis 2. http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/25/8844649/french-taxi-driver...
Uber et al may be harming the taxi business, but my friends and I only took taxis if we had to in our town because they were hard to find, and generally sucked. Now we Uber to go out because it is so convenient. Another friends car broke down and he just never replaced it. He didn't drive that much anyway, and Uber satisfied his need for a car. He would have never done that with the traditional, unreliable taxi in my town.
Uber has definitely expanded the number of people who take a driver service. I wonder if anyone has done any statistical studies around DUIs and Uber coming into a town.
A quick Google search will give you some examples.
so it is more applicable to simply assume it is "blatantly true" until you prove it isn't, as well as find all of the incumbents that were obliterated
In AirBnB's case, the only way it can really grow the market is by providing an efficiency that didn't exist before, and in that respect it clearly has: apartments, houses or spare rooms that used to sit empty when the owner was away can now be put to use through AirBnB. That said, I think it's naive to look at AirBnB's cherry picked data and not think they are having some marketshare impact on hotels, especially on the budget side where AirBnB is clearly a substitute good (think Motel 6 vs AirBnb).
but in any case I am genuinely curious. I can see the conflict of getting data only from AirBnB.
But perhaps prices simply reached an equilibrium. For example, there was a time when I could count on AirBnB being MUCH cheaper than hotels. Now they are about the same in most areas I look in. I can also see some hotels having less variance in their prices during certain time periods.
People also travel a lot more these days thanks to cheap flights (which have just gone through years of low fuel prices) and higher disposable income, so the holiday market as a whole is expanding.