Crenk

Over the last few months the market of ad serving has really heated up. Firstly, it was the acquisition of DoubleClick by Google, which was really supposed to accelerate Google into the display advertising market. While at the same time Open X announced funding, basically so they could turn their ad server from self hosted to hosted and controlled by Open X. Then comes the very recent announcement that Google is launching Ad Manager. Finally, this week it was announced that Yahoo are entering this competitive market and are soon to launch Yahoo AMP!.

The overall fight seems to be about control and more importantly information. Google has always been a company that is hungry for knowledge and information, but it seems that everyone wants to know all about advertising, be it long tail or short. Each option has its own unique selling point, DoubleClick is for huge volume clients, Google’s Ad Manager is just simple to use (especially if they have Google Adsense as defaults), Open X has a great free service for self hosted companies and with the inclusion of a hosted option im sure they will see even more interest, then finally there is Yahoo and AMP!, this service has had amazing early reviews and im very keen to get my hands on it.

Thus, who will win this race? Well, it has always been hard to look away from Google, but I do think that Yahoo might be on to something here. Yahoo has a very strong display advertising business already, and if they make a Ad Manager that ties in hundreds of other ad networks and offers great transparency, then im sure they will be in the box seat.

Interesting news has come our of Technorati today: former boss David Sifry has announced changes that will help bloggers again, like in the old days of Technorati.

Changes include:

1. Change of design and results on search pages.
2. Authority filtering. You can now narrow your results based on authority, which really only goes so far when tryign to evaluate the usefulness a blog, or if it is a spam blog.
3. Charts. You can now see the popularity of a word over time.
4. New Server Farm. They recently moved from 365 Main to a new colocation center.

It is good news to hear that Technorati is back and trying to satisfy their core customer base that helped them get to where they are today. Recent redesigns have completely turned away several numbers of bloggers from the service and although these changes are going in the right direction, im not too sure if they will be able to get all the bloggers back. Time will tell! Technorati stick to your core customer base, cause Google owns the rest of the blog search market!