When most of us think of multisided platforms, the ones that come to mind are those, like Apple and Facebook, that make heaps of money. Or unicorns like Uber that, if cap tables mean anything, someday will. Of course, anyone who really knows the history of platforms may recall the many that aspired to make gobs of money but never did and quickly died (think of the many B2B exchanges that never made it to the other side of dot-com bust). And don’t forget your brother-in-law’s great platform idea, which will make you both rich if only you would invest your life savings in his startup.

What’s amazing, though, is that there are many platforms that have created massive value, but have never made a profit, and don’t even strive to make money — on purpose.

Most likely, you have of one of the worldwide champs in this category in your wallet. MasterCard and Visa didn’t make, or even look, for profits for decades. MasterCard started as a not-for-profit membership association, in 1966, and Visa did the same, in 1971. Both associations managed their brands and ran the clearing and settlement systems for banks that issued cards or helped merchants accept cards. These card networks were allowed to charge their members just enough to cover cost and provide working capital. (For more on this, read Dee Hock’s book about starting up the Visa network.)

By the mid 2000s MasterCard and Visa were handling trillions of dollars of transactions between consumers and merchants around the world. Then the banks decided to turn the associations into for-profit companies, IPO them, and cash out. MasterCard IPO’d in 2006, and Visa followed two years later. Now they are very focused on making money. Around the world, though, many countries still have domestic payment networks that operate as not-for-profit platforms.

Many other multisided platforms haven’t made the leap to making money. In fact, some not-for-profit multisided platforms — hardly household names — have helped drive the major technological revolutions of the last several decades, including the internet and mobile. Standard Setting Organizations (SSOs) are multisided platforms that help members reach agreements over a standard (For example, mobile carriers, handset makers, chip providers and many others have to agree on a common standard — like 4G — for what they do to work together.) The SSO usually publishes a standard and disseminates it at low cost or even for free. That standard may then become a platform for many firms that produce complementary products and their customers. The SSO is therefore a platform for creating platforms.

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SSOs comprise a massive, yet almost invisible, industry. There are hundreds of them (almost 1,000 by one count) around the world, competing with each other for membership and influence. Thousands of companies belong to them and many belong to several. A recent study found that SSOs published more than 200,000 standards between 1975 and 2011. It also found that these platforms were responsible for a significant amount of economic growth in the last several decades.

In fact, SSOs played a major role in the technological revolution, reverberating throughout the world, from smart mobile phones. Every generation of mobile phones, starting in the early 1990s, followed years of efforts by an SSO to create standards. That has involved creating standards that can coordinate mobile carriers, chipmakers, device markers, software providers, and many other technology providers.

Commentators tend to give a lot of credit to Apple and Google for developing great mobile software platforms. But Android and the iOS wouldn’t have been possible, and in fact probably wouldn’t have been created, if SSOs hadn’t created the technology platforms for providing fast and capacious broadband. A not-for-profit SSO, 3GPP, whose members include mobile carriers, chipmakers, device makers, and other technology providers developed 3G, which made the initial iPhone possible, and 4G, which made smart mobile phones really useful.

As phone users we think of 3G and 4G as synonymous with the speeds of the networks for our phones. In fact, though, all the players in the ecosystem design their products and software around detailed standards for these technologies published by 3GPP. You couldn’t get an Uber, talk to your friends with WhatsApp, or send selfies to your Mom without the work done by these not-for-profit multisided platforms.

If we dig more deeply into economic life we find even more multisided platforms that help businesses and consumers. In Boston, where we live, many of the high-end boutiques and cafes are located on Newbury Street, off the Public Garden. The Newbury Street League is a not-for-profit membership association that works towards making Newbury Street a nice experience for shoppers and in doing so makes having a store on Newbury Street more valuable. Those are the same sorts of things that a for-profit mall owner tries to do.

The Newbury Street League exemplifies what multisided platforms do: by their nature, and however they are organized, they create value by harnessing externalities—good and bad ones—between participants. (An “externality” is what economists call things we do to one another, for better or worse, that don’t get compensated for in the price system—like polluting the air (bad) or posting uplifting messages on Facebook (good).) The Newbury Street League stimulates good externalities, prevents congestion, and works hard at preventing bad behavior by their members.

SSOs have done this, for example, by developing elaborate mechanisms for companies to meet, develop, and vote on standards. Many have supermajority voting that essentially requires their diverse members to reach consensus. Other SSO rules are important too. In high-tech areas, where patents are important, SSOs generally require members to disclose patents that could enable them to hold up other members if the standard relied on the protected intellectual property and to charge fair and reasonable royalties for essential patents that do get included in the standard. The tremendous success of SSOs, such as 3GPP, demonstrates the importance of design in encouraging exchange of value among the members and of a governance system to prevent members doing bad things to each other.

Not-for-profit platforms aren’t just important in their own right. They also provide insights for everyone who prefers, in fact, to make heaps of money from starting and running a for-profit platform. By stripping away their profit motive, and many other artifacts of traditional markets, not-for-profit platforms reveal important features that create social value and that could create private profits.