Is Ad Tech Eating the World, or Eating Itself?

Consolidation was supposed to happen a decade ago. It may finally be here.

Jul 7, 2023

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Five years ago, I wrote the following post for Business Insider:

'We need a fundamental rethink': MediaMath, long seen as an ad tech takeover target, is instead building a war chest to fix a broken industry

The ad tech company MediaMath has received $225 million in financing from the private equity firm Searchlight Capital Partners.

This past week, MediaMath essentially went poof. Even for crazy, sometimes illogical industry, the speed of this collapse is fairly stunning.

From the sound of it, this was a uniquely dysfunctional situation (Lara O’Reilly of Insider does some tremendous reporting here). Still, I’m wondering if there is a conclusion to draw from the following list of headlines:

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