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Online Ad Network Bubble Will Soon Burst
By dave_pasternack | April 21, 2008
Remember, about a million years ago in Web time, when all the pundits were saying that the Net was going to “disintermediate” all of those obnoxious middlemen skimming pennies from every commercial transaction? Well, exactly the opposite’s happened, at least in the world of interactive advertising: today, we’ve got more than 200 ad networks, each of them incompatible with each other, each promising to provide some magic elixer of microtargeting powerful enough to convert dross inventory into pure gold through some proprietary alchemy.
The whole ad network as gold rush thing is sickeningly ridiculous. Every new ad network that comes along means another decision level for media buyers to perform, even as the whole industry is crying out for a simpler way to buy media. Just about everybody with a clue expects massive consolidation to occur in the online ad network sector, and it’s not going to be pretty. The last thing this industry needs is more middlemen, incompatible technologies, and new fly-by-night ways to buy crap inventory. What we all need is a way to buy media in a way that’s less, not more annoying than it is right now, and only the SE’s seem to be getting this right. As SE’s get better a
Topics: I'm Mad as Hell and I'm Not Clicking on It Anymore, Online Ad Industry Foolishness |
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