However, if you're a publisher of a Web site, and want to place ads on your site, sorting through this morass of offerings is a royal pain. Which network pays the best prices?
Rubicon Project is just the latest company trying to help publishers deal with this fact. Its twist: It looks at the specific articles on a Web site, and selects ad networks depending on which one is most likely to bring the highest paying ad for that content.
Last week we covered the Los Angeles company's $6 million first round of financing. Today, it has just launched in an invite-only testing phase. Its tab-based interface, robust analytics features, and technology that manages relationships with networks all make this company worth a look.
Rubicon is one of a handful of other companies, including Pubmatic, that claim to find the best paying ads from a range of networks. However, these companies all face a big challenge: The ad networks are protective of their data, and don't share their prices in real-time. So Rubicon et al. will always running slightly behind, seeing price information only after the fact.
Pricing is important: A single ad network may have five high performing ads available, but then have fifteen that are relatively weak. A publisher wants to mix and match, selecting only the high paying ads from that network, but then going to another network if it needs more ads.
It only gets more complicated from there: A publisher may have different types of content (news sections, blogs, videos) where banners work better than text. Some ads may work well on the top of page, but do badly at the bottom, depending on reader habits. Further, there could be a significant amount of international traffic seeing ads targeted only for the U.S. On all these fronts, the Rubicon Project tries to automate everything.
First, you go to Rubicon to set up your site. You tell it what size and type of ads (text or banner) you have, set up "zones" (home page, blog page, etc) and choose from a checklist of content "channels" (business, culture, health, entertainment, and so on) that define each zone. If you have good demographic data about your audience, you can input it as well.
Rubicon classifies and rates the ad networks based on ad-type and quality, flagging those that have too many "punch the monkey" ads, for example, or not any from premium brands. You can browse them to find those that fit your needs. If you have a significant Latin American audience, for example, you can add Hispanic ad networks to the mix.
You then replace your current ad code with Rubicon's, and it goes to work, automatically selecting which ads get displayed and making regular adjustments based on performance and audience, so if someone from Mexico comes to your site, he'll see an ad fromHispanoClick instead of Google. This is notable because U.S.-based advertisers often have no interest that demographic, have typically hesitated to try to monetize their international audience.
The site also reports geographical breakdowns to show where your ads are doing well and enabling you to see how each network is performing and how much each owes you. The whole package is easy to navigate and use. Its value-proposition is simple: earn more money and do less work.
The company, which offers its service for free, says it has no revenue model in place.
