Microsoft Writing Off Nearly All of the $6.3 Billion it Paid For aQuantive • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft Writing Off Nearly All of the $6.3 Billion it Paid For aQuantive

#31

Post by earl » Tue, Jul 03, 2012, 1:01 AM UTC

dos1 wrote: post #23

earl wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, had msft executed, there definitely is room for competitors for both dfp and dfa. Many pubs seem to want something, anything besides dfp. Plus the rise of ssps is (maybe?) a reaction to the pub adservers not innovating. For god's sake, openx (written in php!) is being used by pubs. also, hi (earl from qc)

Could you maybe explain some of those acronyms you used?

Sorry dude.

When a publisher (pub) sells ad space to an advertiser, there are at least two sets of servers involved. There is a publisher / sell side ad server (pub adserver) which picks which ad to show in an inventory slot on a page view and generally tries to optimize for the publishers income, plus does publisher side reporting. There is a advertiser / buy side ad server which does cross publisher reporting; allows the advertiser to control, change, and update creative; tries to do frequency capping; tries to do cross channel reporting; and tries to optimize on the advertisers' behalf. These are generally not the same server. Google's ad server were basically purchased from doubleclick. DFA is doubleclick for advertisers and DFP is doubleclick for publishers. Openx is a competing publisher ad server. Atlas is microsofts advertiser ad server; it competes with dfa.

An SSP is a supply side platform. It's a service that basically replaces a pub ad server and attempts to get as much money for the pub as possible by switching between ad networks and possibly trading off between guaranteed, network, and rtb. It basically is a saas stack that replaces a publisher ad server. An SSP will often also attempt to prevent first party data leakage.

a DSP is a similar beast for the demand side and can start to replace an advertiser ad server.

From my perspective (and I think many pubs) there hasn't been much innovation between dfp and openx. Hence the movement to SSPs.

First party data is, in a nutshell, the fact that a user visited a site or a page. From this you can derive all sorts of things such as the purchasing interests of the user.

guaranteed is presold ads, the most lucrative for a publisher

Re: Microsoft Writing Off Nearly All of the $6.3 Billion it Paid For aQuantive

#32

Post by look_lookatme » Tue, Jul 03, 2012, 1:21 AM UTC

eli wrote: post #29

earl wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, had msft executed, there definitely is room for competitors for both dfp and dfa. Many pubs seem to want something, anything besides dfp. Plus the rise of ssps is (maybe?) a reaction to the pub adservers not innovating. For god's sake, openx (written in php!) is being used by pubs. also, hi (earl from qc)

dfp = DoubleClick for Publisher (helps publishers run the ads that advertisers buy) dfa = DoubleClick for Advertisers (helps advertisers buy ads) OpenX was an open source ad serving platform you could install on your own server, but AFAIK the company behind it has more-or-less killed the open source product and is instead pushing a closed-source hosted ad serving solution.

OpenX Enterprise is definitely being pushed hard. They also continue to work on OpenX Market, their exchange.

OpenX is not good, but yeah a good number of people are using them.

Re: Microsoft Writing Off Nearly All of the $6.3 Billion it Paid For aQuantive

#33

Post by calbear81 » Tue, Jul 03, 2012, 1:28 AM UTC

fungi wrote: post #25

calbear81 wrote: post #9

I was part of aQuantive on the Avenue A | Razorfish side and was there for about 2 years leading up to the MSFT acquisition and was also part of another MSFT acquisition (Farecast) so I want to provide some context/opinion on where the business was at it when it was purchased. - The Atlas ad serving platform and related ad exchange platform was one of the top ad systems alongside DART, Valueclick, and others. There w…

Razorfish pitched to our marketing department (I was the token tec on the panel). Being a Microsoft appendage was a big negative from my point of view... as was the giant Silverlight logo in their pitch docs. > MS could have leveraged this team as a focus group and to enroll these clients to test innovative ways Don't do that! If we hire you to do work for us and you sucker someone in our org in to some shit like thi…

I didn't mean you get your clients to try things without telling them. I meant get them into pilot programs to find more incremental places to acquire new customers.

In regards to creative, Avenue A | Razorfish was a combination of two distinct skillsets. Avenue A handled media buying which in most cases is more important to the success of a campaign than the creative and the Razorfish part was the "creative" side of the agency that worked on all of the campaign assets, etc. Both sides worked together to ensure that the creative was right for the audience (media).

Re: Microsoft Writing Off Nearly All of the $6.3 Billion it Paid For aQuantive

#34

Post by paulsutter » Tue, Jul 03, 2012, 1:30 AM UTC

earl wrote: post #20

paulsutter wrote: post #15

Microsoft bought aQuantive as a knee-jerk reaction to Google's acquisition of Doubleclick. It was comical at the time because - aQuantive's Atlas was a distant number 2 to Doubleclick's DART in terms of ad server market share - aQuantive had no plans to create an ad exchange, nor did their market share make that a credible possibility, and - Microsoft somehow paid twice as much for aQuantive as Google paid for Double…

But, had msft executed, there definitely is room for competitors for both dfp and dfa. Many pubs seem to want something, anything besides dfp. Plus the rise of ssps is (maybe?) a reaction to the pub adservers not innovating. For god's sake, openx (written in php!) is being used by pubs. also, hi (earl from qc)

My view is that the ad server business itself isnt a great business. The strategic value in Google buying Doubleclick was the market share of publishers firmly locked into Doubleclick as a platform, with all their ads flowing through that platform, and the corresponding opportunity to lock all of that inventory into a big ad exchange.

The strategic value of market share is huge when establishing an exchange. Exchanges are the purest network effects businesses that exist.

I agree that DFP and DFA aren't well loved by anyone. Im not even sure if the folks at Doubleclick love the product. But switching ad servers is as difficult for a publisher as changing keyboard layouts would be for you and me. Your whole process, and training of all your ad ops people just gets locked into the system you're using. This lock in is probably what makes it so hard to improve the product. But this lock in is what made Doubleclick so valuable to Google.

Google isn't the only smart operator in this space. Brian O'Kelley at AppNexus simply out hustled all of them to build an platform as important as Google's by linking all the exchanges together. Funny since he was of course CTO at Right Media.

(hey Earl!)

Re: Microsoft Writing Off Nearly All of the $6.3 Billion it Paid For aQuantive

#35

Post by sriramk » Tue, Jul 03, 2012, 1:32 AM UTC

calbear81 wrote: post #9

I was part of aQuantive on the Avenue A | Razorfish side and was there for about 2 years leading up to the MSFT acquisition and was also part of another MSFT acquisition (Farecast) so I want to provide some context/opinion on where the business was at it when it was purchased. - The Atlas ad serving platform and related ad exchange platform was one of the top ad systems alongside DART, Valueclick, and others. There w…

But wasn't having you guys around at MSFT been a conflict of interest? Would have muddied the waters with other agencies, even if there was a Chinese wall between Razorfish and AdCenter.

Re: Microsoft Writing Off Nearly All of the $6.3 Billion it Paid For aQuantive

#36

Post by dos1 » Tue, Jul 03, 2012, 1:44 AM UTC

earl wrote: post #31

dos1 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you maybe explain some of those acronyms you used?

Sorry dude. When a publisher (pub) sells ad space to an advertiser, there are at least two sets of servers involved. There is a publisher / sell side ad server (pub adserver) which picks which ad to show in an inventory slot on a page view and generally tries to optimize for the publishers income, plus does publisher side reporting. There is a advertiser / buy side ad server which does cross publisher reporting; allo…

Thanks for the explanation! Having never dealt with internet advertisers I didn't realize there was as much to it as there is :)

Re: Microsoft Writing Off Nearly All of the $6.3 Billion it Paid For aQuantive

#37

Post by eli » Tue, Jul 03, 2012, 2:10 AM UTC

look_lookatme wrote: post #32

eli wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dfp = DoubleClick for Publisher (helps publishers run the ads that advertisers buy) dfa = DoubleClick for Advertisers (helps advertisers buy ads) OpenX was an open source ad serving platform you could install on your own server, but AFAIK the company behind it has more-or-less killed the open source product and is instead pushing a closed-source hosted ad serving solution.

OpenX Enterprise is definitely being pushed hard. They also continue to work on OpenX Market, their exchange. OpenX is not good, but yeah a good number of people are using them.

I'm not surprised that many people use OpenX -- I'm surprised at how little competition there is for ad servers.

Last year I wanted to build an ad server that could integrate with legacy backend systems and add some custom targeting logic, but I couldn't figure out a good way to do it. All the popular ad servers are either crappy, too limited, too expensive, or some combinaton of the three.

Re: Microsoft Writing Off Nearly All of the $6.3 Billion it Paid For aQuantive

#38

Post by fungi » Tue, Jul 03, 2012, 2:11 AM UTC

calbear81 wrote: post #33

fungi wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Razorfish pitched to our marketing department (I was the token tec on the panel). Being a Microsoft appendage was a big negative from my point of view... as was the giant Silverlight logo in their pitch docs. > MS could have leveraged this team as a focus group and to enroll these clients to test innovative ways Don't do that! If we hire you to do work for us and you sucker someone in our org in to some shit like thi…

I didn't mean you get your clients to try things without telling them. I meant get them into pilot programs to find more incremental places to acquire new customers. In regards to creative, Avenue A | Razorfish was a combination of two distinct skillsets. Avenue A handled media buying which in most cases is more important to the success of a campaign than the creative and the Razorfish part was the "creative" side of…

> you sucker someone in our org in to some shit like this

Didn't think they would secretly do that.

Ulterior motives of corporate overlords, be they pushing Silverlight or pulling us into a msn search strategy are a recipe for friction.

That said i'm not in marketing, not in the US, and we are a small org with limited resources that is perpetually screwed around by agencies, so my views are probably of limited value.

Re: Microsoft Writing Off Nearly All of the $6.3 Billion it Paid For aQuantive

#39

Post by whatusername » Tue, Jul 03, 2012, 3:15 AM UTC

Useful_Idiot wrote: post #22

cheez wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and let's not mention the top three AI specialists who committed suicide in the year Google launched their algos... ok? What?

I'd look into AI specialists who all decided to kill themselves in that "very common" way of putting a bag over their head, wrapping duct tape around their necks and then 'doing an oven' to finish the deal. You know, like those pretty wives of CEOs who commit suicide when their hands & feet are bound? Or ex-Dictators have heart attacks all of a sudden? [And yes, I can cite those ones too for bonus points]. It was ver…

[citation needed]

Re: Microsoft Writing Off Nearly All of the $6.3 Billion it Paid For aQuantive

#40

Post by Useful_Idiot » Tue, Jul 03, 2012, 4:54 AM UTC

whatusername wrote: post #39

Useful_Idiot wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd look into AI specialists who all decided to kill themselves in that "very common" way of putting a bag over their head, wrapping duct tape around their necks and then 'doing an oven' to finish the deal. You know, like those pretty wives of CEOs who commit suicide when their hands & feet are bound? Or ex-Dictators have heart attacks all of a sudden? [And yes, I can cite those ones too for bonus points]. It was ver…

[citation needed]

HN doesn't disappoint! Down-votes, and no-one can do due diligence.

Push Singh

He was named one of the "IEEE Intelligent Systems 10 to Watch," an award that honors young researchers in artificial intelligence. He planned to take a faculty position at the Media Lab this fall...There has been some public note of the similarity between the suicide of Push and that of another more renegade AI Researcher a couple months earlier, Chris McKinstry

http://web.mit.edu/~sdavies/www/mit-suicides/

Bhuwan Singh G

The Boston Herald reported that Singh suffocated himself with a yard-waste trash bag.

And so on.

As I said ~ that whole "killing yourself by applying common garden bags in what in most countries would suggest torture / outside interference" is... rather common in some circles. Blinkers. Wear them! Fear the wider world! Down vote everything outside of your cubicle!

(Hilarious ~ no wonder the Angels love this site, so easy)

Bonus round:

The death of Shacknai’s girlfriend, Rebecca Zahau, was determined to be a suicide, Gore told reporters today...

Zahau, 32, was found nude, with a rope around her neck and her hands and feet bound, a sheriff’s department official said at the time

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-02/medicis-ceo-shackna...

You're all so cute! Committed to the Homo Sapiens 2.0 meme, with nary an eye at the real world. Delightful! Oh, and I rate the ~15+ downvotes as your votes for blindness & wilful ignorance over enlightenment and ability to do even an iota of original research. Not a single one who did an even cursory search / knew enough about the field to give a "yes-coincidence-but-not-conspiracy" post.

:Case proven ~ HN is, indeed, for Useful Idiots. . . . . . Now I've provided a citation or two, does this mean all the Aspies in the room will actually do a bit of research? Doubtful, but there we go. [Citation needed if anyone on HN actually is intelligent enough to do basic research]

“"If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?”

~ How very true, and how easily you're put into hutches here. . Hint: I mentioned three, and only linked to two! Not to mention that whole accident thing. How dangerous AI research can be, when algos rule the world ~ remind me how many young PHD students go into Finance these days? That would be a good place to start one's ruminations! So many random and pointless deaths in the Big Apple.