Ad Exchanges Revisited

My research on Ad Exchanges has continued, but I have been quiet on blogging about the business. Here are some updates.

• It has been more than a year since the launch of the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. It seems to be doing well. See the presentation here for stats. Of relevance to research: "in January of last year the real time buys on DoubleClick’s AdExchange represented just 8 percent of the total. By January of this year, that figure was 64 percent." So, many research problems with real time bidding are now important, from optimizing call out, to understanding the game theory, arbitrage and others.

• Individual publishers are building private ad exchanges around their own inventory. CBS Interactive, Forbes.com, NBC Universal (universal audience platform), Weather.com (channel 5) and Turner Broadcasting Systems. "For publishers, setting up exchanges has several advantages: they cut out the middlemen and they allow the publishers greater control over consumer data." Check out NY Times article. This means there is a lot of research to be done on inventory optimization, understanding the dynamics of advertisers automatically choosing across publishers and so on.
  

Hooray for AdX research!