A Micro Economic Analysis of the Romanian Online Advertising Market—Toward More Fair Value Sharing?

The Romanian online advertising market has been growing recently at a rapid pace and has adopted the main technological advancements from more mature markets. Our analysis explores whether Romania’s online advertising market structure could provide a ripe field for potential abuses of dominant position from players wielding high market power. Such cases are currently the object of legal inquiry from the European Commission’s antitrust watchdog. This paper examines all of the three components of the supply chain—the advertisers, the publishers, and the advertising intermediation companies—inquiring into the degree of market concentration of each one. A particular focus is placed on the role of advertising intermediation (AdTech) companies and whether the technology they provide could offer them some undue advantages. The research uses data collected in the past 15 years by the main Romanian industry associations, which gives us insight into the workings of both ends of the market: the advertisers through which the demand is manifesting, and the publishers who represent the supply side. In addition to this, we have also studied the media buying algorithms used by these companies, in order to better understand their influence on the market’s functioning. For each of stated market components, we have calculated the degree of market concentration. The findings show that the Romanian online advertising market is a highly concentrated one, especially for the ad intermediation component, which is effectively composed of a duopoly. Further studies are needed in order to better understand how this market dominance affects the functioning of Romania’s online advertising market.