Great quote

From Michael Walrath, the current CEO of Right Media, in an interview:

How are you going to compete with Google when it launches the Doubleclick exchange?

It’s hard to tell what it’s going to be, when they haven’t brought a product to market and we don’t know whether it will be similar or different. But we have a number of advantages –  getting to critical mass and liquidity is not easy to do, and once you get there it’s hard to compete with you.

Also, in a more functional sense, running an exchange is very different to running an ad management platform. While many features overlap, constructing a different type of market is not as intuitive as people assume for companies in the ad serving space. We have had to learn a lot of really difficult lessons over the last few years about the really fundamental business problems of running an exchange. Anyone else that wants to play in the space will have to learn those lessons as well – and they are not the kind of lessons that you can just throw engineers at.

By no means do we underestimate the competition that is likely to come, but we’re pretty comfortable with our leadership position and we expect to extend that lead

Comments

[Darren Herman]

Great quote and it's very true.