Now that more than 3 years have passed since the post, can you pls update the post on what actually has happened in the value chain, how have ad exchanges evolved and what effect did they have on ad networks, publishers and advertisers? Would be very helpful to know.

Regards

The one thing I will disagree with is the financial market stockbroker analogy. Hedge funds thrive on their models, this is how they arb. That doesn’t necessarily translate to the Exchange model, unless you integrate your model with the exchange — at which point you essentially become a technology provider. There will simply be too much data and too many different transactions to do too much offline modeling.

Although — I will refute my point that on the premium side of things this might actually work. It might well be possible that arbitragers will assume risk on inventory. E.g., place a buy for the next month at a flat rate assuming that they will be able to sell it at a higher price later. Assuming publishers are risk-averse, in that they would rather take a lower guaranteed price today than have a higher potential payoff, this might become a very lucrative market.

I definitely see a large role in the future for any agency providing management services, but I don’t think you’re going to see rapid consolidation to a single company per exchange. Think of them as the equivalent of stockbrokers — they all essentially do the same thing, yet there’s an absolute ton of them.

It’d surprise me if arbitrageurs were to suffer unduly as the exchange model rises in popularity. More efficiency = greater volume = more volume to arbitrage. (There’s tons of arbitrageurs on the financial exchanges, which are more efficient than we’ll ever hope to be simply because the goods are fungible.) You’ll go from parties making fat margins on a little traffic to thinner ones on a lot of traffic, that’s all.

Ultimately, any company with a decent creative department has nothing to fear from an exchange — targeting and optimization will only take you so far if your ads suck. There’s always going to be a market for ads and landing pages that convert. That, incidentally, is one of the biggest reasons why lead generators like LowerMyBills.com are successful, not because “it’s because it’s incredibly difficult for one financial services company to sell their services online.” Some banks have ridiculously good lead generation departments in-house.