The author explicitly said google isn't going away any time soon.
The doubleclick exchange is, to first order, direct response. Not brand. The rise of mobile has not been particularly profitable for google. It's not clear that google's strength -- direct response -- will translate well to mobile. Google's cpc has been falling -- though simpson's paradox makes this difficult to interpret.
Google is, btw, seriously threatened by amazon, though that isn't mentioned in this article. Google's business is to tax ecommerce; the rise of amazon as a shopping destination where, particularly with prime, you don't search anywhere else cuts google out. Hence their initiatives like delivery.
Not necessarily! As brand advertising becomes more important, E-Commerce is only going to be a small slice of the online advertising pie in the future.
The most expensive advertising deals on the planet, Superbowl Commercials, aren't about instant action. Coca-Cola doesn't pay millions expecting you to go out immediately and buy a coke.
You're going to see less ads about "click here to buy this now" and more ads like "Company Y: remember us!"
Using display as a proxy for brand, even assuming display is entirely brand, Google made ~$3B from display ads in 2013, vs $58B in total. Even if you were right, they have a very long way to go.
DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA) is the largest real-time ad bidding platform on the web. It serves >25B display ads a day, and does a significant amount of brand advertising.
Very little of display advertising these days is direct response. It's common for display ads to have click-through rates in the range of a few per million impressions.
Yes, programmatic ads far outweigh direct response ads in terms of number of impressions. However, the real money is in direct response! Those ads on Yahoo or WSJ's homepage? That's the result of a guy picking up a phone and saying "wanna buy my homepage for X $100,000 or X $1,000,000 per day?"
Direct response is basically a way of artificially reducing supply on the most valuable properties.
The doubleclick exchange is, to first order, direct response. Not brand. The rise of mobile has not been particularly profitable for google. It's not clear that google's strength -- direct response -- will translate well to mobile. Google's cpc has been falling -- though simpson's paradox makes this difficult to interpret.
Google is, btw, seriously threatened by amazon, though that isn't mentioned in this article. Google's business is to tax ecommerce; the rise of amazon as a shopping destination where, particularly with prime, you don't search anywhere else cuts google out. Hence their initiatives like delivery.