Age of Ad Networks

#Digital advertising market is going through a serious change for the last couple of years. State-level privacy laws in the US and platform privacy policy decisions (ATT of #Apple for instance) those have propelled are changing the ownership of the data available in the web and platforms and the ways it could be deployed by the platforms and advertisers.

Once having their utmost privilege to the abundant “first-party” user data and freedom to process these to create a well-crafted audiance “profiles” for the advertisers, platform companies such as Facebook and Google are trying to turn their apps into content and app distribution portals. AMP (Google) and Instant Articles (Facebook) are the recent examples of this trend. That is happening because “hub-and-spoke” model* of digital advertising (summarized at the end of this article) is not working well anymore.

And that is the primary reason behind recent collapse of #Meta share price as its first-party data (your likes, comments and inputs into the groups) is not much helpful for #targeting as your purchases in a mobile game or on the web.

So what is the next?

Many companies (advertisers) are developing their own proprietary ad network. Yes, that is.

Reason being that will allow them to #monetize their own data (and #Apple is among them).

Just to provide a couple of instances:

> Walmart is expanding its ad business through M&A

> Following UberEats, Doordash launched an ad platform.

> Zoom is introducing ads to its for free users

> Ironsource acquired an ad network Tapjoy…

So dear investors, get ready to see “Ad Network” lines in the 10-Ks of listed companies soon.

And sorry for those large platforms, those good old days seems to be too far away to make a good comeback. They, certainly, will try to adapt to the new circumstances.

*The model was based on operating a data warehouse full of usage “signals”, converting those signals into #targeting parameters, applying those to the ad inventory and creating positive feedback loop for the advertisers through engagement data.