[laurentmeyer]

I don't get what imbalance this article is talking about? Advertisers pay publishers to market their products, and sometimes it is financed with VC money - but this is true of any market, not particularly adtech.

Someone sells inventory, someone buys inventory, and there are middlemen to make this happen. Maybe too many companies are competing to be the middleman, but that's a problem that exist in every market (food delivery?). In the end some companies will die, so what?

I can't see where a gap is created other than this. Investors are betting on technology companies, that are supposed thrive when even more money is spent on programmatic than today (taking away budgets from TV, search...)

Maybe the author is not making a good enough distinction between publishers and technologies? The diagram of "advertising" the author refers to is almost entirely composed of technologies - very few agencies or publishers.