Someone just pointed me to Jonathan Mendez’ great blog post “The Market Forces Killing Display Advertising“.
Obviously we’re not in display, but a bunch of what he writes about resonates for us.
A couple notable things about this post:
- He talks about the “buy side” and “sell side” of the market, something we haven’t seen enough of and something we talked a lot about when we were out pitching for funding.
- He uses the word vigorish. Awesome. Publishers should get their (fair) cut.
- He does some simple models to identify that publishers are being underpaid for the value they’re driving.
- He talks about fragmentation among publishers as a key source of weakness.
Although he’s talking about display, I think a lot of his insights apply to us. The market is ripe.