The ‘Yield Management Tools’ Category
Andrew Nibley was recently appointed CEO of Yieldex. From last week's release, "Prior to joining Yieldex, Nibley was Chairman and CEO of WPP's advertising and digital marketing agency Marsteller. He has also served as CEO at several digital media companies owned by media giants Vivendi, Bertelsmann and Reuters, including co-founding Reuters New Media." Read more. The Company added that it had more than quadrupled its revenue and doubled its customer base in 2010.
Nibley discussed his new role and a few of his plans for Yieldex.
AdExchanger.com: Why did you decide to take the CEO role? Given your PR experience, might we expect more from Yieldex in that area?
AN: I decided to come take the job at Yieldex because I had met Tom Shields and immediately took a liking to him and was impressed by his thinking and his strategy for the digital advertising industry. As I got to know everyone else at Yieldex, I became totally convinced that this was a company in the right market at the right time. Yieldex has been deliberately quiet for the past few years as it has built a solid technical platform, a well-respected product and a blue-chip list of clients. Now is the right time, I think, for the company to emerge a little more into the spotlight. And yes, with my background in journalism, advertising, public relations and marketing, I think it is safe to assume that Yieldex will be taking a more public posture going forward.
How will Tom Shields role and responsibilities within Yieldex evolve with your appointment?
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Yield Management Tools | No Comments »
John Carnahan recently discussed his transition from Fox Audience Network (FAN) to becoming CTO of Rubicon Project as well as his new company's product roadmap.
AdExchanger.com: Where are you from a tech perspective in transitioning FAN tech to the Rubicon Project? Future product development aside, when will it be completed?
In many ways the core tech is already integrated by the existing relationship. For example pre-acquisition MyAds campaigns have been serving with publishers that also leverage the Rubicon Project’s REVV platform for some time. Of course FAN is not just MyAds. Over the past 4 years FAN has been a leader and a pioneer in building publisher tools focused on audience targeting and ad serving for a wide variety of publishers. We will be bringing the combined set of Rubicon and FAN features to bear with a series of initiatives. The first of these initiatives is to further bridge the gap between MyAds advertisers and publishers using the REVV platform, so publishers who weren’t previously leveraging MyAds and want the additional performance demand can gain that access. Longer term our initiatives will focus on building tools for publishers that provide more control and visibility into the demand sources that are available through the Rubicon Project’s REVV Marketplace, and products that give them a lot of flexibility in how they sell inventory through those demand sources.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Yield Management Tools | No Comments »
AdExchanger.com reached out to the publisher technology community for their predictions about the digital advertising ecosystem in 2011.
Click a name below to begin, or scroll:
- Frank Addante, CEO, Rubicon Project
- Michael Barrett, CEO, AdMeld
- Tom Chavez, CEO, Krux Digital
- Mario Diez, CEO, quantrantONE
- Rajeev Goel, CEO, PubMatic
- Marc Kiven, Founder and CRO, Bright Tag
- Jonathan Mendez, CEO, Yieldbot
- Steve Pelletier, CEO, FatTail Inc.
- Steve Perks, GM, EMEA, aiMatch
- John Ramey, Founder & CEO, isocket
- Tom Shields, CEO, Yieldex
- David Soloff, CEO, Metamarkets
- Curt Viebranz, CEO, ad summos
Frank Addante, CEO, Rubicon Project
- Publishers will realize that sales channels are a critical part of their revenue growth (ad networks, exchanges & DSPs) because they don't have the sales coverage to reach every advertiser or the technology to support every campaign. RTB will be the key driver of this realization.
- Defragmentation of inventory due to marketplaces centralizing inventory will cause RTB to see explosive growth.
- Automation is going to put more strain on publishers, they are going to get killed with channel conflict and ad quality.
- Further developments in regulation discussions around data will set the rules of the game, becoming more of an enabler for legit companies (similar to CAN-SPAM act in email - email industry thrived once the rules were defined) than a threat to the industry.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Yield Management Tools | No Comments »
David Soloff is CEO of Metamarkets, a publisher analytics company.
AdExchanger.com: What have you been up to in the 5 months since last we spoke?
DS: Four things: expanding the core engineering team, building the product, deploying with early customers, iterating tightly.
We’re building a very large scale data processing and predictive analytics infrastructure to capture billions of daily transactions on behalf of publishers. We process 2 billion daily events on our infrastructure. We add a terabyte daily to our 250-terabyte clearinghouse of media transaction data. We’re well on the way to aggregating a petabyte of media markets data. Thanks to the collapse in the costs for compute and storage, Metamarkets is capturing primary economic signal to publisher benefit.
What do you mean “primary economic signal to publisher benefit”?
This is data that reflects an economic transaction. It’s a principals trade – one agent in the market has something to sell, another has something they wish to buy. Each party has a set of attributes that perfectly describe the item they want to buy or sell. If we capture billions of these combinations, across geographies, buying agents, selling agents, we begin to describe an entire economic world, reflective of sentiment and activity. If we can process and store enough of this data, we can eliminate noise and locate signal. This data as recently as 9 months ago was too diffuse to capture and too expensive to store -- essentially, global media companies have been forced to behave like a national retailer who would sell billions of items, but due to an infrastructure gap, would expunge nightly all cash register and point-of-sale data, to pretty predictable effect.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Yield Management Tools | No Comments »
Announcement on Monday - likely regarding the acquisition of FAN assets... from the press release:
the Rubicon Project Hosts Press Conference With CEO & Founder, Frank Addante
LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--the Rubicon Project will host a press conference to discuss company strategy and future growth plans.
Who: Frank Addante, CEO and Founder of the Rubicon Project
When: Monday, November 1, 2010 at 11:00am Eastern / 8:00am Pacific. A brief question and answer session will follow the press conference.
Where: Live presentation via WebEx. To register, send name and email address to press@rubiconproject.com. Participants can also follow the event on twitter and submit questions via hashtag #REVV.
Posted in Yield Management Tools | No Comments »
PubMatic announced its new Data Firewall product which the company says enables "publishers [to] get visibility into 3rd party companies that are tracking the publisher’s audience via pixels or cookies and causing data leakage." Furthermore, the product provides the ability to view revenue by third-party provider (such as an ad network) according to the release. Read it.
PubMatic CEO Rajeev Goel discussed the new product and its implications.
AdExchanger.com: Wait, in your last piece, I thought it was not about "data leakage," - but now it appears that it is?
RG: Data leakage, audience data theft, too much pixel dropping behind the publisher’s back - call it what you will, but it is a huge problem. My point in the piece you’re referring to was that "leakage" isn’t the best word to describe what is happening because data isn’t leaked from the publisher, it’s being taken from the publisher.
However, we recognize that "data leakage" is what the industry at large seems to be calling it, and we’d rather fix the problem than worry about re-naming it. I wouldn’t be opposed to someone else renaming it though.
Maybe we should conduct a poll at our Ad Revenue 2010 conference on Oct 7; Doug Weaver (Upstream Group) is hosting what I believe is the first ever panel completely dedicated to the publisher data leakage subject. Or maybe people will leave comments here with suggestions.
Regardless of whether or not "data leakage" remains the industry’s term of choice or not, I’ll still think it sounds nasty.
How do you recommend publishers evaluate 3rd party relationships? Is it strictly CPMs?
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Yield Management Tools | No Comments »
Tom Chavez is Founder of Krux Digital.
AdExchanger.com: How is this platform addressing data leakage (see Chavez recent opinion piece) unlike other publisher-side platforms?
TC: We believe that publishers need to solve the data protection problem before they plunge into data management and monetization. Obviously data leakage and data collection have been getting a lot of press lately. Regardless of what unfolds in the press, Congress or the FTC, all the publishers we're talking to already have a clear interest in demonstrating responsible stewardship of consumer data. The first part of our platform, Data Sentry, detects who's grabbing data on a publisher's site – what we refer to as a 'collector,' who's ushering in those collectors – we call those guys 'ushers,' how much data collection is occurring, across which sections, audiences, and channels, with the ability to drill into individual pixels, individual collectors, individual ushers. Because of the variety of browser and HTML standards out there, identifying how collectors and ushers chain themselves together and reliably measuring data leakage at scale turns out to be really hard.
Beyond the privacy issue, which is a biggie, it's clear that publishers who leak data are leaking money. So Data Sentry offers a KPI on the revenue exposure from unauthorized data collection. By measuring the opportunity cost from data leakage in this way, our Data Sentry adopters can start to recapture lost revenue one nickel at a time.
Finally, there's latency. As all those rogue pixels accumulate on a publisher's site, it takes longer and longer for their pages to load. That's a bad thing for the user in any context, but now that Google and Bing are moving to factor page load times into their rankings, it also degrades the publisher's traffic from search referrals. So publishers have a basic operational need to clean up their pages and manage down the overpixelation that's going on. Data Sentry helps them do that by measuring the latency impact from individual pixels, ushers, and collectors.
How will the demand-side benefit from and interact with the Krux Digital platform?
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Yield Management Tools | 1 Comment »
AdMeld announced in a release that it has raised $15 million in an investment round "led by Norwest Venture Partners (NVP). Time Warner Investments and the company’s existing backers, Spark Capital and Foundry Group." Read the release.
AdMeld CEO Michael Barrett discussed the capital raise and insights on the industry.
When you went out seeking a third round of funding, what were you thinking in terms of new investors, generally speaking?
This all came together very quickly over the past few months. Before we had even considered taking on new money, we were fortunate to build strong relationships with the teams at Norwest and Time Warner Investments. Jeff Crowe at Norwest, who’s now joined our board, is extremely knowledgeable about the DSP/SSP/Exchange space, and Time Warner brings a great premium publisher perspective to the table. The more we learned about the value these teams could bring to AdMeld, it became a natural next step to start talking about how we could work together.
How is the funding climate for ad tech this year compared to the climate for your infusion last year?
Though my sense is that VCs are generally more cautious today than they were in even 2006/2007, over the past year the ecosystem in which AdMeld operates has become very hot. In addition, the company itself has grown dramatically over the past 12 months, which pushed a lot of risk out of the equation, so this time the interest was very pitched and high.
What do you specifically plan to do with this new capital raise?
This raise is about accelerating our development cycles so we can bring our products to premium publishers more quickly. Our roadmap is filled with some very exciting offerings that we’d like to get to market as efficiently as possible. It’s also going to help us as we continue to expand internationally.
Has real-time bidding been a game changer for AdMeld?
RTB has been highly beneficial for our publishers—it’s connected them with millions of dollars in budgets they probably wouldn’t have had access to otherwise, and given them a much higher level of transparency and control over every transaction. As a result, it’s had a big impact on AdMeld’s operations, development focus, and sales outreach strategy. Today RTB makes up around 20% of our overall impression volume, and for some of our publishers it represents 60% of the revenue we generate for them. We’ve seen what it can do, and with each bid we’re learning more about what it means for the future. RTB is something every premium publisher should have in their mix.
What questions are publishers asking you today that they weren't asking you last year?
As agency trading desks have grown in importance and visibility, we’ve been getting a lot more questions from publishers about the role these entities should play in their strategies for sales, coverage, pricing, etc. We don’t see this changing anytime soon. Other than that, I’d say questions about data and data protection is on the tip of everyone’s tongue.
By John Ebbert
Posted in Yield Management Tools | No Comments »
Tom Shields is CEO of publisher yield optimization company, Yieldex.
AdExchanger.com: What have been some big surprises to you regarding the industry as a whole in the past 12 months? - And for Yieldex in particular?
TS: The biggest surprise to me is twofold: 1) that so many DSPs sprang to prominence and got the attention that they did, followed by 2) the gnashing of teeth when Invite Media sold to Google for what people thought was too little money. For years now, there have been so many networks and so many means of reaching remnant inventory – while inventory that generates real revenue for publishers and more value for marketers has been ignored. As the emergence of a yield management function at major publishers begins to take hold, then we’ll see meaningful value being added to our ecosystem.
For Yieldex in particular, I would say that I’m surprised at how many ad operations leaders have taken on the additional responsibility of looking at premium yield in addition to their day jobs. Our business has grown well despite the lack of a yield management function at most publishers.
What are you seeing in regards to traction for Yieldex products and services? Who's using Yieldex?
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Yield Management Tools | No Comments »
Publisher yield management company PubMatic announced yesterday that it has seen significant growth in the past year. In a press release, the company said, "PubMatic also announced that sales revenue is up over 700% in the last year. At the same time, its reach has grown from 150 million unique users per month globally to over 360 million." Read it.
PubMatic CEO Rajeev Goel discussed the company's momentum as well as strategy surrounding its sell-side platform for publishers.
AdExchanger.com: Of the inventory managed by PubMatic, how much is guaranteed and how much is non-guaranteed inventory? How will you penetrate guaranteed?
RG: Let me start with guaranteed/direct sold inventory. We actually don’t manage our publisher’s guaranteed inventory per se, instead we provide publishers with the audience data they need in order to sell audience-based inventory directly - and we give publishers the means to manage it themselves.
Advertisers are asking to buy audience-based advertising directly from the publishers themselves, but most publishers don’t have the ability to meet that demand. Using audience data from multiple data providers that are partnered with PubMatic, the publisher can package their audience and sell it directly to agencies and advertisers. It’s not unlike how the ad nets and DSPs are working with similar data providers, on the flip side, to get access to publisher audiences and sell those audiences indirectly to advertisers.
By doing this, PubMatic is helping publishers on two major fronts:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Yield Management Tools | No Comments »
