adTechGuy

You'll move when your biggest advertiser requests that you start hosting your ads on whatever new thing Google/FB tells them is crucial to tracking the performance of your campaigns.

It's not quite that extreme. Google needs publishers so they won't try to squeeze out "reddit" in this example. It's more that they or Facebook or whoever will charge a tax on every impression our hypothetical publisher sellers, reducing their take home revenue slowly over time as the fees add up and increase.

AdTech companies are completely fucked. Just totally and utterly fucked. Google and Facebook are kicking their asses left and right.

Google "worked with" 3rd parties for the better part of a decade while they improved on their products, but now they are working to muscle them out by taking their best products and blocking them to adtech companies. They took youtube inventory out of their Ad exchange last year. It cost them nothing to do so but crippled a handful of video ad companies and exposed them as powerless.

Criteo has long been held up as an example of a company that managed to forge its own way, but eventually they've started running out of gas too. Their stock price has been tanking since last summer. It's not surprising either. Criteo's bread and butter are dynamic ads, which show specific products to retail shoppers. Well Facebook rolled out its own version of that and it's pretty tremendous. Criteo has to resell that product or lose relevance to its customers but now its just a reseller instead of providing the ad serving and inventory for its customers. This destroys its value proposition majorly.

For performance marketers, sure. But lots of marketers are lazy or are big brand spenders just looking to do whatever gives them the most reach and the richest targeting they can sell to their boss. That spend is migrating from TV/Radio/Print to digital and once it goes digital it goes to Google/Facebook.

There's always going to be new channels that open up and present short term opportunities. Those channels will get acquired or subsumed by Google/Facebook. That's what the next 4-6 years look like in terms of advertising.

Something from your first paragraph answers the question in your second paragraph!

Yes, all advertising will be filtered through Google, Facebook and someone like a Verizon (or whichever Telco can weaponize its data best, currently looking like Verizon).

What that means is that sites like Reddit can still make ad revenue, but only by filtering it through one of those players. That could mean using Google's ad server tech, or integration with Facebook's audience network, or whatever Verizon comes up with.

But yes, most digital ad revenue currently flows through those few players and that will only accelerate.

The true future of Reddit and other publications is as marketing vehicles to sell stuff directly to their readers/audience. Ads are basically just a stopgap along the way to content-driven commerce.