Winner take all in mobile advertising? Or winners by countries?

As people spend more time on mobile devices, advertisers and ad-tech startups increasing want to capture people's eyeballs on those platforms. According to the venture beat article, people on average spend 2 hours per day on their mobile phones. I assume that the statistics is applicable mostly United States. 2 hours per day!! That is more time than I spend on TV! (Note: I only watch TV for about 3 hours a week, and not on TV, but in online streaming sites like ABC.com)

Mobile advertising is a highly competitive space with many entrants aiming to be bigger and better than the previous. All of them aim to help advertiser better monitor ROI and better fine tune the targeting. All of them has incorporated programmatic buy. Programmatic buy just means that you can bid for an ad space in real-time basis based on parameters such as location, time, and user demographics. For example, a gaming app on 7pm wants to show an mobile ad. It sends out a request via the ad network it participates in. The network can potentially shop around different ad networks to find the one with highest eCPM to show. Conversely, programmatic buy tries to find in real-time the lowest CPM while satisfying the targeting parameters for the ad buyer.

What does this mean? Advertising is becoming more and more like the stock market with its many exchanges, high-frequency trading platform, and brokerages. The next stage of development is for exchanges to consolidate to pool together many buyers and sellers. It would provide standardized pricing and bidding strategy for all participants. Think NY Stock Exchange and  Nikkei in Japan. There will be brokerage firms that help ad inventory buyer and sellers to access and find the best price for them in real-time.

Even though the world is flat and getting flatter, there may still many winners in consolidation phase as different parts of the world needing different type of exchanges. Google may dominate the Russian market with AdMob, but TenCent is the powerhouse in China. Let's wait and see!

Inspiration:
http://venturebeat.com/2013/11/11/russian-mobile-ad-investing/
https://support.google.com/admob/v2/answer/3063564?hl=en