Shrinking The Web Down to 2 Players
Or not. A Sanford C. Bernstein analyst has written a 310 page report entitled, “U.S. Internet: The End of the Beginning” to be published in the next week or so. HipMojo has provided some analysis on why this report may be wrong and I’d agree with them. Reuters coverage is here.
I don’t think that the web will shrink down to just two players – competition is healthy and companies will continue to innovate. In the report, it says that Google and Amazon are the two companies that survive and that eBay is a merger target in the near future. Google has not found a way to really generate comparable revenue to the search business yet, though, I feel that one of it’s next big revenue drivers will be the DoubleClick AdExchange in the next 3-5 years. Google is significantly positioned as a potential leader in the exchange space as advertisers and publishers continue to use the DART serving (DFA/DFP) platform and as Google releases new advertising opportunities across games, radio, television, print, etc- and it all becomes available online.
The web is too large a playground for just 2 players.