Krux opened its business-to-business data-sharing marketplace, named Link, on Thursday with the goal of building an open exchange for media and marketer first-party data.
The product has been in development for 18 months and live in beta with some clients for almost a year, according to Krux chief solutions officer and Link general manager Michael Moreau. Krux doubled down on hitting the market with Link due to a recent spike in demand, said Moreau, and the platform will now have 15 dedicated employees who can “help match-make with the right publishers, marketers and data suppliers.”
Krux doesn’t charge based on a subscription or portion of revenue, but takes 25 cents per CPM from the seller and buyer in each deal. Consequently, the quantity or caliber of data in the transaction doesn’t matter, only how many ad placements it led to.
It’s a fairly unregulated market, with companies free to hash out deals on their own or turn to more off-the-shelf options. For instance, a marketer could run a customer-matching test to see if there are any overlaps with publisher’s audience.
“But the most interesting stuff we’re seeing happen is the peer-to-peer deals,” said Moreau. These deals allow publishers and media companies to form temporary co-ops that bundle data for a specific brand or campaign. Hypothetically, NBCUniversal and Edmunds.com could sell their shared audience to an automotive marketer for a campaign.
“Non-walled garden publishers and media brands are sitting on valuable assets, but need to have more creative capabilities for their data to match the effectiveness of the digital platforms,” said Moreau.
The ability to hone category-specific segments is the primary selling point on the supply side. “We have a lot of rich 1st party data within high-demand audiences,” said Andrea Rego, director of programmatic and data management at newspaper conglomerate GateHouse Media, an early partner in the Link market.
“Link allows us to carve out segments across all of these high-demand audiences,” said Rego. For instance, to capitalize on the spike in rates for precise political audiences, GateHouse can develop segments to meet that demand.
Sellers and buyers on the platform don’t have to be Krux clients, though for the moment they almost entirely are. Moreau said that a few media suppliers had been targeted and on-boarded to source “unique audiences and data sets we needed,” though he wouldn’t reveal specific publishers.
