2 ms·

There is a great chart showing the categories of players involved, as well as the companies: http://www.lumapartners.com/lumascapes/mobile-lumascape/ http://ww

There is a great chart showing the categories of players involved, as well as the companies: http://www.lumapartners.com/lumascapes/mobile-lumascape/ http://www.lumapartners.com/lumascapes/mobile-lumascape/ At the left are the advertisers, and the right is the end user. In between you can see so many boxes with lots of logos. The sheer number of companies is what contributes to so much of the ad "weight". Even if the browser had some sort of overview, the players before wouldn't just hand over control. For example Verizon would want to control what happens to users on their network (and already do so).

exelius 11y ago
This chart is the gold standard for describing the ad tech market, but I actually think it is a bit myopic with regards to the "full-stack" view. You're thinking of a strategic control point, and the networks aren't in as good of a position as you would think. Things like SSL limit their ability to perform segmentation via DPI -- but since browsers are the SSL termination point, it's not nearly as much of an issue. With security becoming more and more important and "SSL everywhere", the networks' ability to collect data from ad networks through DPI is disappearing. Typically, strategic control points should be thought about in terms of their physical proximity to the user. That is, if it is a device that the user touches, that device and its software stack represents a potential control point. Currently, the devices aren't the control point (thanks to Google's Android strategy), but the OS and by extension the browser is much more promising. If I had to describe a value chain, it would look like this (you can replace "browser" with "app", though with a much more limited scope): User > Device > OS > Browser > Network > Publisher > Ad tech (most of what is shown in the chart above) > Advertiser Basically, every company on this chart is trying to disintermediate every other company to the right and left of them. What we're left with is a reasonably efficient advertising marketplace that serves the needs of advertisers and publishers, but the tricks and methods used by advertisers are frustrating to users. The browser vendors have enormous control over what techniques can and can't be used to implement ad tech -- the reason Flash hasn't been removed entirely is because Flash-based tracking cookies offer far more information than the browser, especially with regards to video ads. Google hung on to Flash for a long time because of YouTube, but I think they've recently realized that if they can get Flash off of the web, it would hurt their competition more than it would hurt them.

exelius 11y ago

This chart is the gold standard for describing the ad tech market, but I actually think it is a bit myopic with regards to the "full-stack" view. You're thinking of a strategic control point, and the networks aren't in as good of a position as you would think. Things like SSL limit their ability to perform segmentation via DPI -- but since browsers are the SSL termination point, it's not nearly as much of an issue. With security becoming more and more important and "SSL everywhere", the networks' ability to collect data from ad networks through DPI is disappearing. Typically, strategic control points should be thought about in terms of their physical proximity to the user. That is, if it is a device that the user touches, that device and its software stack represents a potential control point. Currently, the devices aren't the control point (thanks to Google's Android strategy), but the OS and by extension the browser is much more promising. If I had to describe a value chain, it would look like this (you can replace "browser" with "app", though with a much more limited scope): User > Device > OS > Browser > Network > Publisher > Ad tech (most of what is shown in the chart above) > Advertiser Basically, every company on this chart is trying to disintermediate every other company to the right and left of them. What we're left with is a reasonably efficient advertising marketplace that serves the needs of advertisers and publishers, but the tricks and methods used by advertisers are frustrating to users. The browser vendors have enormous control over what techniques can and can't be used to implement ad tech -- the reason Flash hasn't been removed entirely is because Flash-based tracking cookies offer far more information than the browser, especially with regards to video ads. Google hung on to Flash for a long time because of YouTube, but I think they've recently realized that if they can get Flash off of the web, it would hurt their competition more than it would hurt them.