The Rise of Hosting on Airbnb
Airbnb (NASDAQ: ABNB) is already a huge company. The stock was almost a megacap when it came public, with its market cap running past $100 billion on its first day of trading. (Its valuation is about $115 billion now.) When a stock is that big already, is there any room to grow?
In Airbnb's case, the answer is very much "yes." The company puts its total addressable market (TAM) at $3.4 trillion. A lot of people think of TAM as some sort of mythical beast. One company never captures the whole TAM. Airbnb's competitors include hotels and motels, and a lot of people will prefer to stay in one of those buildings.
Nonetheless, we are now starting to see an interesting shift in human behavior. Airbnb reports that 4 million people serve as hosts to strangers on its platform. Maybe a good number of those people are old hands at serving as a B&B (bed and breakfast) hosts. But I suspect we're seeing a lot of new people enter this industry for the first time. And that relatively small number -- 4 million hosts -- suggests how much room there is for Airbnb to grow.
Source Fool.com
