Ad optimizer YieldBuild raises $6 million — this area is getting competitive

March 3, 2008 | Eric Eldon | Comments | |

yieldbuild030208.pngYieldBuild offers software that lets a web publisher optimize text advertisement placement and formatting, so the ads will receive the maximum number of click-throughs. In other words, it helps publishers make more money.

Optimizing text ads without this type of software typically involves a lot of manual effort — compiling data from across ad networks on a site, running tests on format changes, etc. And, even after optimization, readers may stop clicking once they get used to the new setup.

Instead, YieldBuild’s algorithms automatically gauge ads’ performances and make constant adjustments to their color, placement, and positioning. VentureBeat’s Dan Kaplan came away impressed by YieldBuild’s results (and its private list of clients) when he took a look at the company last fall.

Text-ad optimization generally seems to be showing promising results, judging by the investment dollars being pumped into startups offering this service.

San Francisco-based YieldBuild has just raised $6 million in a round led by Storm Ventures, with existing investor Hummer Winblad Venture Partners participating. Meanwhile, rival Pubmatic raised an $8 million round at the beginning of this year (our coverage) while rival Rubicon Project raised $15 million a month ago (our coverage).

In a classic case of entrepreneurial iteration, YieldBuild actually started life as HubPages, a service that offers hosted pages where people can write and share their own stories. YieldBuild grew out of the company’s efforts to optimize Hubpages’ ads.

It previously raised $2 million from Hummer Winblad.

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • That is an interesting article. In our experience website owners find it difficult to understand visitor behaviour even with good systems such as Google Analytics.

    We have recently come across an excellent piece of software that not only allows them to monitor individual user behaviour in real time, but also facilitates direct engagement between visitor and user. This has been increasing conversions by an average of 15% in the websites we have implemented it in.

    It seems that the individualised data gives a more enlightening perspective.
  • Hubpages used the mechanism for in their hubs profits calculation