I posted a comment to an article about display advertising and thought the point about publishers being able to make more money through arbitrage was one worth alluding to. At Root Markets I worked with several large publishers including the New York Times (who invested in the company as well) to explore this idea further. Surely a publisher of some scale *could* have the data, tools, relationships, position to justifiably take on some more of the downstream economics from advertising vs. selling their remnant inventory for a smaller amount. I still believe this is true, but I know it will take some specialized help for them to be able to do that.

I hope that publisher-side optimizers (normally people mention names like Rubicon, Admeld, Pubmatic etc.) get to the point where they can do more that just shuffle the same inventory between different ad networks (not to say there isn’t value here, but as one of my college CS professors used to say, if it’s not an order of magnitude difference who really cares?), and actually drive meaningful change in the way publishers parcel out, create, optimize inventory. We’re not going to do it, we’re firmly anchored on the advertiser optimization side. But more than hope, I know it will be happen – just who does it, how and how quickly are the questions.