There is an interesting article on Read/WriteWeb by Sean Ammirati called Google’s Potential Vulnerability – An Open Ad Network. In it, Sean suggets that, despite Google’s huge revenues, they could be vulnerable to the fact that 37% of that revenue comes from ads delivered on sites they don’t control.
While they do have contracts with some of the larger online properties that leverage their ad network, even in that case those networks could switch when the contract comes up for renewal.
Google seems invincible at the moment and Yahoo and Microsoft aren’t making much progress competing against them head-on. But the way to compete against a monopoly is to change the rules of the game. This is what MySQL did with databases and it is what Openads is going to do with the online advertising industry.
Google is still a disruptive force in many areas but it needs to be careful that it’s own disruptive business models are not distrupted by some startup…