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!)