It is a company that has quietly managed to establish itself as a major real-time exchange for trading online advertising. It is a market that is very difficult to break into once first mover advantage is established because scale and liquidity are the most important attributes for the success of any exchange.

Mr Urschell said that there is probably only room for about three ad exchanges.

A neutral MSFT

An important aspect of AdECN is that it is neutral, it is not competing with advertising networks for ads, it trades the ads themselves, linking buyers and sellers, along with demographic, regional, and time-based delivery of advertising.

This neutral model could be a feather in MSFT's cap because Google is competing with its own publisher network. Advertising on Google's own sites has climbed to 64 percent of total revenues when it used to be evenly split with third-party publishers.

MSFT's AdECN exchange combined with its ad server technology could position MSFT as a preffered advertising partner for some publishers because it is not a direct competitor.

- MSFT recently won a major client, Digg, the community powered news aggregator.

- MSFT recently won EA, the world's largest gaming software company, to serve ads in online games.

MSFT is less of a competitor

- MSFT's own sites aren't doing that well, so it could claim that its own sites aren't competing against its publishing partners.

- In contrast: GOOG's own web sites grew 9 per cent in revenues in the most recent three months compared with no growth over the same period for its partner sites - GOOG 2Q 2007.



- Microsoft could sweeten deals with aggressive revenue sharing offers. It could potentially pay out more than 100 per cent of advertising revenues to publishers.

Google and Yahoo have tied up some of the largest online publishers into multi-year deals, however, most of the publishers in their ad networks can leave at anytime. Billions of dollars in online advertising revenues could switch to MSFT in an instant from GOOG and YHOO. It is a huge vulnerability for those companies.

A bonanza for publishers?

A battle for online publishers among GOOG, YHOO and MSFT could result in a bonanza for content producers. The revenue sharing agreements would favor the publishers and it could help some struggling newspapers and magazines.

Advertising agencies have become the prime target of the Internet giants in their most recent M&A activities.

It is all part of the roll-up in the industry, as Sramana Mitra describes it well.

It is also a way for GOOG, YHOO, and MSFT to acquire advertising agencies as part of their inevitable move up the value chain.

The goal in these acquisitions is not the technology but the revenues and customers. Why split revenues with advertising agencies? Especially if you know how much advertising content you can publish in the months ahead. And you have the computing platforms to scale the advertising content much more efficiently.

It is much better to acquire those companies because:

• You recover the share of ad revenues paid to the advertising agencies.
• You also buy the customers. And those customers are going to be increasing their online advertising spend dramatically as they finish up with advertising contracts elsewhere.

These are easy numbers to crunch for the CFOs and justify the valuations of the deals.

But the Internet giants will face challenges:

• These are more people based businesses than they are technology based.  They don't scale nearly as well as servers-and-software. Google and the others know how to grow through servers-and-software but not through people.
• Managing the advertising businesses is going to require skills in managing relations that are nothing like software developer relations. Managing those businesses well and not killing them will be a challenge.
• Their market valuations might come under pressure if their cost of business rises because of the people-scaling factor and impacts operating margins.

The Rise of the West Coast Media

This is all part of a larger trend as the new media companies of the West Coast grow in value, while the old media companies of the East Coast cutback and shrink.

GOOG, YHOO, EBAY, AMZN, and MSFT are all publishers. They publish pages of content and advertising. Some of it is subscription based, some of it is advertising supported. These are technology-enabled media companies.

Our West Coast media companies are growing by leaps and bounds. The East Coast media companies are shrinking.

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