What Happened to the Ad-Network Apocalypse?
Here's Why Most Are Still Surviving
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| Warren Lee | |
Almost a year later, no apocalyptic shakeout has hit yet. So what happened?
Venture and private-equity investments in ad networks have been robust for the past several years. More than 60 ad networks -- vertical ad networks, video, brand, performance, wireless, gaming, behavioral, contextual, etc. -- have raised $1.5 billion in the past five years, and the top 25 firms have received almost $1.2 billion of that total, according to VentureSource. Significantly, more than 75% of the money has been raised in just the past three years. These funding numbers do not include the more than $250 million that was invested in other companies that have already exited (Adify, Blue Lithium, Quigo, Tacoda, Third Screen Media, etc.).
A handful of ad networks have indeed either shut down or been acquired for nominal amounts (Adzilla, Ad Infuse, AdEngage, Jellycloud, mSnap, NebuAd). A few others, like Peer39 (disclaimer: I sit on Peer39's board) and Ringleader Digital, have switched from building ad networks to selling technology instead. And a few are even thriving. Most, however, are merely surviving in this down economy.
Many of the less differentiated, standard graphical networks have not shut down, because they are easy to run with very little expense these days. Most of the lesser-known ones (and even some of the bigger players) are essentially glorified brokers that acquire their inventory on the exchanges. They hire a trafficker, a salesperson or two, sign a 5-cent-CPM contract with an ad server and find someone who knows how to bid the exchanges to stay in business. They don't need to invest significant resources in acquiring high-quality inventory or professionally managing relationships with publishers. These networks can generate a profit, enough to survive and to eke out a decent living.
Fundamentally, I would argue that the ad-network model still makes a lot of sense today and can be quite resilient. In particular, those ad networks that develop proprietary technologies and offer truly differentiated solutions are the ones most likely to be successful.
The basic reasons why so many ad networks are surviving:
- Online usage continues to increase and, according to a recent Forrester survey, has reached an average of 12 hours per week. That provides advertisers and agencies with strong incentives to move more of their ad spending online.
- The number of online sites and publishers continues to increase rapidly, which makes it increasingly difficult for advertisers and agencies to decide which sites to work with. Ad networks can help sort through this bewildering number of sites and target those that are most relevant and appropriate for their clients.
- Online viewership/time spent continues to fragment, so advertisers and agencies can't just work with the largest portals -- even those sites are losing their primacy with the surge in popularity of other sites such as Facebook and Twitter -- and top vertical sites to achieve its campaign goals. With agencies today struggling with tighter margins and needing to do more with less, many find it easier to work with a few ad networks than a number of individual sites.
- Most online publishers still find it difficult and lack the expertise to find, qualify, hire and manage ad-sales executives, which is a reason why many smaller and midsize online publishers turn to ad networks to help handle this activity.
- Through sophisticated analytics and advanced targeting/optimizations, some ad networks can deliver attractive audience demographics at scale. This aligns with the intended goal of most advertisers' media plans. As long as the content is proven to be "brand safe," the exact category of the content often is secondary to demographic profile for many advertisers.
- Price -- ad networks can offer advertisers more cost-efficient pricing than direct publishers can afford to charge. While large publishers justly sell their premium brands at high rates driven by scarcity of inventory, networks can aggregate smaller, less popular sites (with very similar audience characteristics) that do not command the same price premium but can deliver scale. Many agencies/advertisers will continue to prioritize reach and price efficiency equal to or greater than premium-content adjacency.
I believe that, in the next few years, many ad networks will survive but relatively few will flourish and become great businesses with compelling economics. The former group will remain undifferentiated (in terms of technology, focus or services) and compete primarily on price, leading to the continued commoditization of pricing and tighter margins. The latter group will target attractive segments in which they can achieve critical mass and build true barriers of entry through proprietary technologies, value-added services, advanced analytics and reporting, scale operations, etc. This is hard to do but financially rewarding if you are one of the few who can do it, which is why I personally continue to be fond of the ad-network business model (disclaimer: I sit on the board of Tremor Media, the premium-video ad network).
Ironically, the fact that it is easy for most ad networks to generate some level of revenue will likely persuade many of their investors to continue to fund these companies. Better to fund a company that has some revenue but is unlikely to achieve venture-like returns than to admit defeat and to pull the plug. Unfortunate, but true. It will be interesting to watch.
Ad Networks: Venture and Private Equity Investments
| Company | Total funding (in millions) | Date of first funding | Past 3 Years (in millions) | % Raised in past 3 years | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Glam Media | $124 | July '04 | $95 | 76% | ||
| 2 | Specific Media | $110 | June '06 | $100 | 91% | ||
| 3 | Adconion Media Group | $86 | Jan. '05 | $85 | 99% | ||
| 4 | AudienceScience (Revenue Science) | $74 | March '00 | $0 | 0% | ||
| 5 | Federated Media | $57 | June '05 | $55 | 95% | ||
| 6 | ContextWeb | $52 | June '04 | $40 | 77% | ||
| 7 | Gorilla Nation | $50 | May '07 | $50 | 100% | ||
| 8 | IGA Worldwide | $48 | Oct. '05 | $30 | 62% | ||
| 9 | Adknowledge | $48 | March '06 | $0 | 0% | ||
| 10 | AdMob | $47 | Sept. '06 | $43 | 92% | ||
| 11 | Tremor Media | $40 | Sept. '06 | $40 | 100% | ||
| 12 | Undertone Networks | $40 | March '08 | $40 | 100% | ||
| 13 | Turn | $38 | Jan. '05 | $23 | 61% | ||
| 14 | Double Fusion | $37 | Aug. '04 | $26 | 71% | ||
| 15 | AdBrite | $35 | Sept. '04 | $23 | 66% | ||
| 16 | VideoEgg | $34 | April '05 | $30 | 88% | ||
| 17 | Kontera | $33 | July '06 | $33 | 100% | ||
| 18 | Vibrant Media | $32 | July '00 | $0 | 0% | ||
| 19 | Heavy.com | $30 | Dec. '05 | $20 | 67% | ||
| 20 | Quattro Wireless | $28 | May '07 | $28 | 100% | ||
| 21 | Grab Network | $27 | Feb. '05 | $19 | 70% | ||
| 22 | Ripple | $26 | Aug. '06 | $26 | 100% | ||
| 23 | Collective Media | $25 | Oct. '07 | $25 | 100% | ||
| 24 | Adap.tv | $24 | Jan. '07 | $24 | 100% | ||
| 25 | Lotame | $23 | Feb. '08 | $23 | 100% | ||
| Top 10 | Total funding | $697 | $497 | ||||
| Average funding | $70 | $50 | |||||
| Top 25 | Total funding | $1,168 | $878 | ||||
| Average funding | $47 | $35 | |||||
| All companies | Total funding | $1,491 | $1,139 | ||||
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Source: Dow Jones VentureSource
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| ABOUT THE AUTHOR | |
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Warren Lee is a venture partner at Canaan Partners, where he leads digital-media investments, specifically in the New York corridor, from Canaan's Connecticut office. Previously he was at Comcast Interactive Capital, where he led the media firm's investments in several global technology companies. In the name of full disclosure, he has invested in and serves on the boards of several media and advertising startups, including Associated Content, Motionbox, Peer39, Tremor Media and Vivox. |
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Steve
http://BrutusReport.com
I'm glad you raised the topic of ad exchanges and real time bidding systems. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to squeeze those items into this article (word limit) but I will tackle that topic in a future article. I agree that these two developments are becoming increasingly important, though I believe that the pace of transformation will take time and that different segments of the online ad market (i.e., text, display, online video, etc.) will be impacted differently and at different rates.
Warren
Take a look at the top 25 ad networks highlighted in the article. Less than 50% of them by my estimate have reached or are close to reaching profitability. Warren rightly points out that VCs have continued to fund them because by definition ad networks make money (vs. other web 2.0 companies in many VCs' portfolios that don't), but that will change when VCs realize that ad networks can't be valued on revenue generation ability alone.
Take a look at ValueClick's (public) revenue multiple. It's pathetic because VCLK has terrible margins and no growth. The public has figured out that ad networks need to be valued on revenue AND margins -- when will VCs?
We have now have two types of inventory in the market: high priced premium inventory that is sold directly, and non-premium inventory that is powered by ad networks. But coupled with the targeting and profiling now widely available, they now tend to perform roughly the same.
So does Gresham's law apply here? If so, bad money will chase out the good and the premium inventory will disappear. Publishers who are dependent on selling premium inventory (good money) will die well before the ad networks (bad money) do.
Interestingly, pre-2000 there was considerable consolidation in the ad network space by DoubleClick and 24/7 -- for scale, one supposes. But in the last year we have seen proliferation with out consolidation -- a year ago there were 300 networks, but according to recent reports there are as many as 400 today -- aside from the brief buying spree of two years ago by GOOG, YHOO, AOL, and MSFT.
Consolidation occurs when there are economies of scale. Does this suggest that there are no economies of scale left in the ad network business? If the platforms, data and inventory are now commoditized, then any group of talented salespeople with a group of agency relationships in a vertical can start an ad network.
Zach -- I agree that demographic/behavioral data (and not content) is now king, and really ought to be the main differentiator between ad nets. But I can't understand how proprietary bidding technology can ever be a sustainable competitive advantage beyond the very short term.
If bidding tech truly gives certain ad networks an edge, a vendor will enter to supply it, just as vendors now supply the platforms and data. In the SEM market...seven years ago you could have a real sustainable advantage by bidding intelligently on keywords. But the tools for SEM bidding are now widely available and understood.
I do think some ad nets will be more profitable and trade better than others, just like some hedge funds trade better than others (and many fail). But I doubt any networks will be "shut-out of access to media." There is plenty of media.
Publishers are still price-takers in an oversupplied content economy. The losing ad networks will just lower their prices and survive with thinner margins, until the Publishers disappear. When the content boom truly ends, then we might see a shake out.
Jane Stone
VP Marketing
http://www.pointbanner.com
Appreciate the great comments. Definitely worth thinking about further.
My personal view is that it's relatively easy to start and operate small-scale ad networks (solutions such as Adify's make it super easy), but I believe that operating and scaling a large ad network requires significant work and investment (hence the need for venture capital). Managing a handful of advertisers/agencies and publishers is one thing; doing the same for tens or hundreds of each becomes increasingly challenging and difficult.
Warren
with all due respect, but the question should not have been whether some/most of the ad networks make any money now, but if the billions invested in them have generated expected (optimum?) return. In my view, the answer is NO.
Was it an opportunity lost? Yes. Investing in platforms that enable content creators and publisher monetize their offerings in ways other than advertising -- such as pay-as-you-go and micropayment models -- would have been a much better deal. Better in terms of ROI, but also resulting in a safer, cleaner and bigger Internet, a bigger pie to share for everyone, not just a handful of big players who monopolize the Net but still need to figure out how to monetize it.
The differentiation is between commodity and proprietary bidding software. If all the software does is something simple, where no significant advantage can be found, it becomes commodity and a vendor can provide it- think email clients, ad serving, word processing, etc. On the other hand, if one company's software can be significantly better then another's, it can provide a competitive advantage to that player in the marketplace. The software providing an advantage becomes proprietary and companies certainly don't want to share it with their competitors- think Google's algorithms, Goldman's high frequency trading software, UPS's package software, any hedge fund's system. In real time bidding, the individual impression valuation process, algorithms, data (including data about users, domains, placements, and creative optimization), ad matching, and human insights all provide a huge (exponential in our experience) advantage over other bidders. When ad companies are bidding to buy media and spending hundred of millions of dollars, it lends to reason that the best companies will want to control such a competitive advantage.
I challenge you to find any market where competitors are bidding for a core piece of their business where the top players would be happy all using the same commodity system.
To your point, the SEM business is very different. Keywords are single dimension problems, very simple to solve and a plateau is hit pretty quickly. Display media buying is multi-dimensional, much, much harder. Even still, I imagine Efficient Frontier can argue that their propriety software is better then their competition's.
Zach Coelius
CEO, Triggit
Mark
Thanks,
Jeff Simpson
Twitter: @jsimpson
Jeff: Let me know what your email address is and I'll send you a copy of the data.
znakit: I respectfully disagree. While pay-as-you-go and micropayment models can be quite successful for a number of online content categories/types (i.e., sports, entertainment, gaming, virtual goods, etc.), I believe that online advertising still offers the biggest revenue generating opportunity. Even during one of the worst recessions in over fifty years, online ad spending in the US will either be flat or maybe slight up this year. Not bad given what has happened in many other industries.
Warren
wlee@canaan.com
I would agree that the current recession is a good reference point, a sort of a measuring stick one can use to evaluate the performance of the ad-supported and pay-as-you-go models. But then... If it is true that online ad spending is mostly flat or "slightly up" this year, then paid content is booming, during the same worst-in-years recession. And, you have to agree that hardly any VC has invested in those paid content models lately.
So, on the one hand, you have the ad networks, heavily supported by the VC/PE, and which make little or no money at all; on the other, there are the paid content sites that use micropayments or pre-paid cards, they do not get any funding, and still they generate billions. Yes, billions! What is the better or the best opportunity then?
As my finance professor would say, It is very easy to make someone a millionaire -- all you need is for that "someone" to be a billionaire first. This is precisely what the ad-models did to the billions invested in them -- turned them into millions.
If paid content (I'm assuming online content here) is indeed booming, can you provide specific examples? I'm genuinely interested ... perhaps I need to add this as a future investment area.
In regards to ad networks, I would argue that it is too early to judge how good or bad these investments are. Remember that over 75% of the $1.5 billion that has been invested has been raised in just the last three years. How well these startups deploy this capital in the next few years will determine whether these investments can be considered successful or not. Too early to tell at this point in time.
Final point: Adify, Blue Lithium, Quigo, Tacoda, and Third Screen Media collectively raised $100 million in venture capital and in the past three years have returned close to $1.3 billion to shareholders. In addition, three other ad network/exchange companies -- Advertising.com, Massive, and Right Media -- collectively raised $150 million and returned another $1.3 billion. Clear examples of where millions have indeed been turned into billions, I think.
--Warren
As to profitability, I am well in tune with the FS at the above companies. They are all profitable at their core businesses. If they are burning VC money, it is because they are electing to invest. The comment on VCLK reflects a lack of knowledge of their biz. Fastclick is the network. The rest of the company is a leadgen play and that space is getting slammed due to competition, govt regulation and other factors.
I'd be happy to send you our numbers :) in a private e-mail.
I am sure you have heard about PlaySpan's acquisition of PayByCash first and then of SpareChange, which monetizes successfully social networks, an area where ad-supported models seem to have been doing poorly. NB: Facebook tries to copy the success of Spare Change and plans to launch its own "Pay with Facebook" platform; same with PayPal, which already eliminated the fix minimum to make its micropayment offer more attractive, it also builds its own Platform X (I believe it is called) to cash in on the paid content trend. And this is just social networking and virtual good. The virtual goods business alone is estimated to bring up to $17.5 billion by 2015 (according to Startegy Analytics) You can also check JupiterResearch or the recent VSS Forecats; they both predict that paid content (in general) will grow faster than the free or ad-supported one.
Then, there is the music or -- broader -- the entertainment and gaming, of course -- just as you mentioned. Both types of content generate billions in annual revenues. Then, there is the Amazon's Kindle, Sony's eReaders and an array of other similar hardware by major companies that hope to turn their devices into content distribution channels. Their business models are long-term subscription or on-demand, pay-as-you-go solutions with an option to skip ads.
But as I've said at different occasions, the ad-supported and pay-as-you-go models do not have to be mutually exclusive. They can work in tandem. Unfortunately, many of the VCs who invest so eagerly in the ad-supported models, stay away (often as far as they can) from the one based on users' direct payments. I hope the current recession and the fast and mostly "organic" growth of such companies like SpareChange or myYearbook or Zong will prove that they are mistaken -- as paid content models increase the pie and maximize profits.
What I still struggle with, though, is who is going to buy all these ad networks and give us our great returns? Yahoo is now effectively out of that business and ValueClick has a depressed currency. That leaves Google and Microsoft, at least until AOL gets its spin out done. It takes a long time for shake outs to play out, so I'm not sure I'd declare victory on this one quite yet. Check in after two more years, when investor and management fatigue set in and there remains a dearth of interesting M&A options.
Thanks for chiming in. Good luck with DataXu; Mike Baker is terrific and that space is certainly going to get very interesting in the next 18 months.
In terms of returns, I agree that it's an important question, not just for the online ad network space, but also for the many other (all?) sectors that VCs have come to know and love. In regards to ad networks, it's just like any other typical VC sector where all the returns are concentrated in a handful of companies. Per a prior comment, eight companies - Advertising.com, Adify, Blue Lithium, Massive, Quigo, Right Media, Tacoda, and Third Screen Media -- made up the bulk of the returns (over $2.5 billion) generated in the past 3-4 years. Several of these companies, I believe, were hitting many of the metrics (i.e., profitability, revenue growth) that were needed to go public; in fact, Advertising.com was about to go public before it was acquired by AOL. I believe that the same will hold true for the current crop of ad networks and that a small number of them (i.e., Adknowledge, Collective, Specific, Tremor) will have the potential to either go public or be acquired for premium prices. Unfortunately, there won't be 60+ great exits.
Warren
Keep the great articles coming. Would love to see something on ad optimization companies like Rubicon, Pubmatic, etc.
Of course not. Funny. The chart lists the top 25 ad networks sorted by total amount of funding raised. Listing all 60+ ad networks would have been unwieldy. According to VentureSource, YuMe has raised $19 million, ScanScout - $17 million, and BBE - $10 million.
Warren
As you mentioned above, "The number of online sites and publishers continues to increase rapidly, which makes it increasingly difficult for advertisers and agencies to decide which sites to work with."
For me, the recent increase of online ad impressions on the web has occurred because of the proliferation of user generated content -- facebook, comments on articles, blogs, etc. and I think this is here to stay. So, while traditional, top tier, publishers may start to pull back the inventory they give to ad networks/exchanges, I see it being offset by ad impressions coming from sites with user generated content.
Hence, the ad-network apocalypse was diverted.
The situation here in Europe resembles what you are seeing in the US market. The predicted large scale shake-up in the ad-network space has not occured yet. While the purchase of Adlink by hi-media and Unanimious by Orange has helped consolidate the market, there are over 76 ad networks in the UK market alone.
The growth of ad-networks in Europe is being mainly driven by a few factors including:
1. The growth in display ad-spend across large markets including Spain, France and Germany.
2. The explosion of social media and the supply of cheap unsold ad inventory it has provided.
3. The ability to trade and monetize inventory on an IP address basis; this alone has made Europe attractive enough for some large US ad networks including Burst, Specific Media and Tribal Fusion.
4. The growth of video advertising which while in its infancy delivers higher margins for publishers and networks alike. Networks like SmartClip in Germany are doing very well out of it.
RevenueMantra.com is focussed on this space.
Thanks
Sam
Your parenthetical comment at the start that only 15-20 really matter is critical here. What do we really consider an ad network? When Valueclick launches an ad network focused on mothers - what does that mean? How is that different than a mother channel in a network.
Here's a list of 400 networks - http://adnetworks.net/?p=18 . It's a bit of a crazy list and I've never heard of most of them. Are the rest really networks and do they really matter? No. In fact, unless a "network" is offering a really valuable niche (think GoodHealthAdvertising in the health space) or a technology (eg, Tremor, Scanscout), if you're not in the top 25 on Comscore then nobody is calling you back.
What's most interesting to me is not what happens to the 400, it's what happens to the top 25. MediaMath works with top agency holding companies and they consistently say they want to move all their "network spend" to the exchanges as soon as they can. Agencies want control and the exchanges give it to them. I talk to many of the big networks, some are leaning into the challenge (eg, Adconion, TMP), others are not (I won't name them). No matter, the next few years will be fun.
Mark Mannino
VP Supply + Data, MediaMath
www.displayandsearch.com