Digital advertising has long been a major battleground for Google and Facebook, but this year Facebook appears to have gradually abandoned plans to compete hard with Google's DoubleClick, with a series of tweaks to its advertising technology products.

For nearly half a year, Facebook has shut down liveRail, the SSP platform, the advertising trading platform FBX, and decisively cut the DSP business before it was launched on a massive scale. The original ad server "Atlas" was transformed primarily as a measuring tool.Facebook Audience Network (FAN), on the other hand, has been re-kept.Earlier this year, it was reported that FAN's advertising had been cashed out for $1 billion and $3 million a day, based on last year's Q4 performance survey.

Speculation has reached a tipping point where a choice must be made about whether Facebook wants to use the platform itself as an open buy-to-let platform or a closed-door mass media supplier. Clearly, Facebook is not embracing the former.

Michael Collins, CEO of Adelphic, a mobile advertising ad company, saysFacebook is implementing a media-based strategy, a supply-side strategy, that competes with Google as a helper. Facebook itself is a big success.

Facebook pulls out of market dominated by buy-to-play rolesEvasive new businesses that force it to be more open, and focus on building more controlled, exclusive media inventory carriers.With headerbidding technology, Facebook can bypass traditionally programed and direct-running advertising channels and embed the SDK in every APP, every instant article, which greatly strengthens its position in the media ecosystem.The industry is also relatively positive about this, think that its media-centric strategy is enough to make it popular in the digital advertising industry.

Atlas makes Facebook's advertising supply more assessable, and facebook recently launched the Audience Network ad-rated pricing system to improve the overall quality of advertising on third-party platforms. All of this supports Facebook's media-centric development strategy.

Google DoubleClick isAdvertising services (ad serving)heavyweight players. Building a rival is not an easy task, and As a platform for Facebook's ad serve, Atlas has never been a rival to DoubleClick.

It is understood that Atla's adoption of creative formats such as mobile and video is lacking, and the delivery of creative advertising is not recognized by advertisers. The most powerful customer of the atlas advertising service, AT&T, has recently been using it for measurements, according to multiple sources.

In addition, according to David Murnick, executive vice president of digital business and technology at Amplifi, the media investment division of Qualcomm, Qualcomm's customers are not interested in the heavy lifting of switching technology stacks. He also said that over the past six to nine months, several customers have been testing Atlas, but they are happy to use Atlas for user evaluation rather than as an advertising server.

So Facebook followed the market's advice and repositioned Atlas. After the transformation, Atlas, as a measurement tool, was not a benchmark Google DoubleClick, but as a combination of attribution analysis, measurement and media tools, in the same category as Google's Admetry and AOL's Convertro.

The Atlas trait is that Atlas can use Facebook's data for better attribution and measurement, which is a path through Facebook's "walled garden" and is a good thing for the industry. However, it remains to be seen whether this openness is only a product of Atlas as a product of ad servers and the cornerstone of more open products.

The best way to use Atlas is for advertisers to use Atlas tags to fine-tune ads and measure marketing performance both inside and outside the Facebook platform. According to Murnick, most of the customers who tried Atlas had not yet reached that stage, but had already started testing on a larger scale.

Starting in the second quarter of 2016, advertisers can use Audience Network to reach ads outside of Facebook. In May, Facebook added video ads to Audience Network to expand as many types of ads as possible. From the second quarter of 2016 to the third quarter of 2016, AudienceNetwork's advertising spending increased by 4%, and click-through rate (CTR) increased by 37% over the same period, far outpacing Facebook's native ad click-through rate.

However, like other Audience Networks, there is a lack of visibility for buyers to use FAN to serve ads (Ad Viewability), advertisers can't guarantee brand safety for ads, and ensure the quality of the people who click on those ads.Facebook doesn't disclose how many media outlets it has on fan, and it's flooded with unknown media and mobile apps on the Audience Network, which has a more complex advertising environment and can't avoid fake traffic issues.

Ad quality and security have seriously affected FAN's popularity, and in an environment where most advertisers focus on high-quality traffic and audiences, some media agencies believe that Audience Network has failed to improve marketing results and will instead weaken delivery. Jennifer Schaen, vice president of Performics, the company's performance marketing arm, is skeptical of TheUdience Network because it does not give buyers much transparency and control.

In contrast to Performics, Facebook's marketing partner Nanigans let 59 percent of its customers use FAN in the third quarter, and Andrew Waber, its manager of media insights, says Nanigans data shows that Audience Network is as good or even outperforming Facebook's native ad inventory. FAN is good at helping marketers of mobile apps, and case studies show that FAN brings higher click-through rates to advertisers and lower marketing costs for individual user installations.

Jennifer Schaen says click-through rates are nothing if FAN doesn't drive downstream metrics, such as sales metrics, visibility metrics, login metrics. There's no point in getting a show or click. Nanigans also plans to explore in future studies how effective it would be to use the downstream indicator FAN. In fact, the performance of different advertisers on the Audience Network varied, with Nanigans finding that the return on ads for one advertiser through FAN increased by 22 per cent, while the other by 4 per cent.

To address advertisers' concerns, Facebook recently retested the Audience Network to let advertisers know how to use it, such as traffic or sales, increase advertisers' control over the media, and get more clicks. After all, if the overall advertising quality of third-party inventory suppliers is not well grasped, it is Facebook itself that is ultimately revouring.

The answer is that both Atlas and FAN support Facebook's media-centric strategy, which is a key to breaking the advertising revenue bottleneck. Atlas meets the needs of marketers, measuring how much they spend while proving the value of their ads. FAN induces marketers to tilt their marketing budgets toward Facebook, making money even if marketing costs are not invested in Facebook's own media assets.

Facebook's platform is nearly saturated with ads, and the growth in the number of registered users can't keep pace with the growth of advertisers, which means that its rapid growth of more than 50 percent will slow unless it finds new locations and new audiences to push ads. Coupled with multiple challenges such as Snapchat's launch, investors are betting on other Internet ads that could eat into Facebook's market share.

While advertising products such as LiveRail and FBX can also be a source of revenue, Facebook has chosen to phase out these buyer tools.The ultimate motivation for this series of product decisions is, on the one hand, the sharing of "wealth", the addition of more media resources to their own camp, the establishment of a closed media ecosystem,In the end, in the stag-by-deer procedural market, grab the advertiser's marketing costs and get a bigger share of the cake.

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