Third, the bond rating fifi rms may have belatedly realized that the fifi nancial regulations described above meant that bond issuers needed their bonds to have the “blessing” of one or more rating agencies in order to get those bonds into the portfolios of fifi nancial institutions, and the issuers should be willing to pay for the privilege. Fourth, the bond rating business, like many information industries, involves a “two-sided market,” where payments can come from one or both sides of the market (as discussed in this journal by Rysman, 2009). For example, in the two-sided markets of newspapers and magazines, business models range from “subscription revenues only”.
