SearchAd Wreck VC-Backed Ad Tech Firms have Arguably Inflicted One Big Mess on Digital Advertising
Blame Mary Meeker. Definitely blame Google. And most of all, perhaps, blame MySpace.
Whoever’s fault it was, somewhere around the mid-2000s many people got the idea there was an enormous gap between time spent and dollars spent on the Internet—and that gap needed to get filled in somehow. They likely got the idea from Meeker, a well-known venture capitalist in Silicon Valley known for her much-anticipated Internet Trends presentation each year. Then Google set the expectation that ad-supported Internet businesses can have hockey-stick growth. And thanks to MySpace, the idea emerged that every single page view rendered can and should have an ad—or lots of ads—attached to it.
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One would be hard-pressed to find the premium Web publisher getting rich from ad tech. But what about the advertisers and their agencies that have the upper hand in all this? “I’ve been arguing for some time that fragmentation or disruption is not good for this industry,” says Will Margiloff, CEO at IgnitionOne. “Marketers want simple; they don’t want more layers. And there is more money going into this space than there is in the actual space.”
To read the complete article, click here.
Whoever’s fault it was, somewhere around the mid-2000s many people got the idea there was an enormous gap between time spent and dollars spent on the Internet—and that gap needed to get filled in somehow. They likely got the idea from Meeker, a well-known venture capitalist in Silicon Valley known for her much-anticipated Internet Trends presentation each year. Then Google set the expectation that ad-supported Internet businesses can have hockey-stick growth. And thanks to MySpace, the idea emerged that every single page view rendered can and should have an ad—or lots of ads—attached to it.
...
One would be hard-pressed to find the premium Web publisher getting rich from ad tech. But what about the advertisers and their agencies that have the upper hand in all this? “I’ve been arguing for some time that fragmentation or disruption is not good for this industry,” says Will Margiloff, CEO at IgnitionOne. “Marketers want simple; they don’t want more layers. And there is more money going into this space than there is in the actual space.”
To read the complete article, click here.
