Ad serving landscape changing quickly

If you are in the ad operations and ad serving industry be prepared for major changes in 2008. If you are an independent proprietary ad serving vendor it will be rough sailing.

In the last two years most of the top ad serving technologies have been consolidated: Atlas bought Accipiter, Microsoft purchased Atlas, OAS went to WPP, Doubleclick bought FalkAG, and Google acquired Doubleclick.

Since then, the three top ad networks have been whittled down to three two, with Google and Microsoft/Yahoo left standing. with Microsoft and Yahoo trying to figure out what to do.

Now, as Google prepares to offer cut-rate (free??) ad serving technologies to online publishers to gain pieces of choice ad inventory, ad serving will become a pure commodity. Most other large ad networks are also now offering full-featured publisher-side ad serving to their clients. Ad serving management will become part-and-parcel of ad networks, with Google and Microsoft being the biggest.

Those who can survive this industry shift will be specialized proprietary ad serving vendors (such as CheckM8 and ADTECH), niche ad networks and site networks utilizing cost-effective open-source ad serving (such as OASIS or OpenAds).