Posts Tagged ‘premium publisher’

Happy Belated 4th Birthday, Rubicon!

May 5th, 2011

Devan Fearman

Things have been moving so quickly around here lately, that we forgot to stop and celebrate an important
milestone – the Rubicon Project’s 4th birthday!

On May 1, 2007 the Rubicon Project launched with one lofty goal in mind – to automate the buying and selling across the $65 billion global online advertising industry. Beginning with a 2,000 square foot office, one bathroom and about 10 employees…I think it’s safe to say that our team has come a long way!

Here we are celebrating our fourth birthday in a time when the industry continues to push the limits on innovation and display advertising is expected to reach $30 billion in 2012 (eMarketer). Along with our partners and customers, we’re on our way to accomplishing the mission we set out to conquer. We couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity that lies ahead for the advertising ecosystem.

Of course, we’d like to take a moment to thank our 450+ premium publisher customers for their continued support. The product developments we’ve made over the years would not have been possible without your insight, feedback and trust in our team. It’s because of you that the REVV platform has reached 80+ billion ad transactions per month and 500+ billion real-time bids per quarter.

And last but certainly not least, thank you to all 250 Rubicon team members, across 8 offices in 5 countries. It’s your hard work, devotion and significant contributions that make Rubicon the leading advertising technology company.

Happy Birthday to our team and thank you to our customers for believing in us! Here’s to many more….

The Language of AdCheq

May 3rd, 2011

Saata Bangura

REVV, Real-time bidding, REVV Marketplace … AdCheq? We’re all familiar with the aforementioned pieces of the Rubicon Project puzzle. AdCheq, on the other hand, isn’t a technology we’ve often discussed externally, but it plays a pivotal role in how REVV manages and facilitates publishers’ advertiser blocklists. Adcheq captures, identifies and, with the help of our team of experts, classifies new ad creatives that are served into the REVV platform against 104 industries and 10 ad quality categories (including Adult/Provocative, Shaky/Flashy, Belly Fat, etc.). In addition, AdCheq enables REVV to develop and maintain advertiser profiles within the platform – all necessary for protecting publishers’ direct sales channels, user experience and brands.

How does AdCheq fit in to the REVV platform for publishers? First, publishers define their business rules around selling their inventory through sales channels – controls including blocklists, geographic rights, transparency settings and pricing floors, for example. Once those rules are set, the REVV brand protection toolset scans, harvests and classifies all creatives that run through the platform – this is where AdCheq comes in.

How does AdCheq work? The process begins when ad creatives show up for the first time within an ad tag. Each new creative, or media file is individually labeled. AdCheq has enabled some 450,000 media files to be classified since September 2010. When necessary, ads are marked with ad quality categories, such as Shaky/Flashy or Belly Fat. When publishers want to block ads with certain content and/or from advertisers from running on their site(s), the accurate labeling and flagging of the ads in AdCheq is crucial. With over 2,000 new ads running through the REVV platform every day, AdCheq ensures unwanted ads – like belly fat ads don’t “squeeze” their way through.

Once an ad has been labeled, it goes through the verification process. In this step, each ad is reviewed twice and classified using AdCheq by real live humans working for the Rubicon Project from our HQ in Los Angeles, as well as from locations around the world. Then our Editorial/Ad Quality Team goes through these labeling options to choose the best one, using REVV’s ad quality standards as a guide. Accuracy and relevance are key here – it is mission critical to capture and identify all the information about each ad correctly to ensure that publishers do not see ads they’ve blocked, for any reason, on their sites.

There are approximately 10,000 advertisers with approved profiles in the AdCheq system, with hundreds getting added each week. These advertisers that are pulled from tags across the REVV platform have detailed profiles in AdCheq that include pertinent information, such as the website URL, company logo, all past-submitted media files (creatives) and industries in which the advertiser does business. Once all of this information is cataloged, the advertiser becomes an approved advertiser. From this point forward, all creatives are associated in the system with the advertiser they represent, along with all the other classification information about the creative itself.

Once all the information about the creative and the associated is designated with AdCheq, that data is stored within the REVV Helix database, which enables ongoing ad monitoring, filtering and blocking. It is because of the classification powered by AdCheq that publishers using REVV can limit or prevent the appearance of specific advertisers, industries, subsidiaries and holding companies – along with ad quality types, sizes, etc. – to avoid conflict with their direct sales teams’ efforts and ensure the publisher’s desired user experience.

Today, AdCheq is one of the many internal tools used at the Rubicon Project to manage brand safety issues for publishers. With continued innovation, there are plans in our current product roadmap to release AdCheq for direct use by publishers in the near future. Stay tuned for more updates on this product and many other safety and security product innovations in the coming months.

Focus on the Right Competitors

April 5th, 2011

Devan Fearman

Last week our CEO, Frank Addante, presented at Digiday’s Digital Publishing Summit in Dear Valley, Utah. The presentation, titled “Realizing the True Value of Digital Experiences” was focused on elevating the conversation among the advertising ecosystem and encourage everyone to start thinking in a new way. He proposed to the room that we should all start working together instead of against each other  to capture a larger percentage of the $200B waiting to be claimed by the industry.

Posted below is Frank’s presentation, along with the key highlights. You can read Frank’s full post blog post, including his advise on working with competitors, on his Founder’s blog.

We encourage everyone to get involved in the conversation around realizing the value of the true digital experience. You can participate on twitter by following Rubicon (@RubiconProject) or Frank (@FrankAddante).

Realizing The True Value of Digital Experiences by the Rubicon Project
View more presentations from the Rubicon Project

Key Points:

  • Something’s wrong: consumers are valued at 10X the rates when reading the same article in the NY Times print newspaper vs. shifting their attention 90 degrees to their computer reading the exact same article online at the exact same point in time
  • Digital experiences are getting richer:  started with AOL walled garden of content, World-Wide-Web came along and brought a flurry of content from premium websites, social networking connected everyone and inspired user generated content, video brings emotion and dimension and now with tablets we can hold the Internet in our hands (just like a newspaper)
  • But, we’re not capturing the increased value (rates/value are still the same as they were 10 yrs. ago)
  • Publishers are over-reacting:  they aren’t able to capture value so they’re throwing up pay-walls – blocking consumers from content and shifting burden to them to monetize it (opposite of the Internet promise of content access), they fire ad networks because of concern about pricing, they strip their valuable brands out of the market when selling through channels (concerns over channel conflict) and block data because of privacy concerns
  • Advertisers are reacting too: they’re holding back billions of $$ from the market because they want the exact opposite – transparency, leverage data, harness the innovation from over $1BN that was invested in ad technology in 2010 alone, and they need efficiency (it costs 3X as much to buy online vs. offline) – doesn’t make any sense in a tech driven environment!
  • Lastly, sorry to say it – but the way we sell media is bullshit!  We’re using tactics from the 1950′s – the “mad men” martini lunch days.  The best dinner wins, not always the best value or the best technology
  • If this continues:  lower revenues will lead to lower quality content which will attract lower quality audiences which will eventually be commoditized (and yes, traded like pork bellies) which will only lead to lower revenues and so on and so forth…
  • The quality content business could go out of business.
  • Lots of talk in the industry (committees, forums, working groups, etc.) — but no action!
  • Instead:  energy focused on competing with each other, like rats eating at the last piece of pie (like it’s the last dollar in the market)
  • But, there’s a much bigger pie available (5X as much $$ – $200BN)
  • We at the Rubicon Project propose a new way forward:  work together instead of against each other
  • We take the term “project” in our name very seriously.  We’ve been working from day one to help the industry and the ecosystem realize the true value of digital experiences.  We’ve been committed to efficiency, transparency, an open market and harnessing and organizing the collective innovation and value that’s been created in this market — this from day one.
  • Now, we’d like to invite everyone to join the project…
  • By everyone, we really mean everyone:  our 450 customers, 600+ ad networks/exchanges/DSPs who participate in the REVV Marketplace, our smaller competitors (AdMeld, Pubmatic) – we’d be foolish to think we can solve every problem in this market alone -  and the big giants in the space (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, etc.)  Yes, the big guys have billions of $$ being spent with them and you probably think you can go at it alone…  But, if we can all come together to solve this problem, there are billions more waiting for us.
  • What if we took all of the energy we spend working against each other and instead worked together?  What if we:
    • create an open market
    • make it easy for advertisers to buy (easier than broadcast and print)
    • deliver value to the consumer (through advertising)
    • unlock the benefits of data; safely
    • embrace privacy and put it in the hands of the consumer (where it belongs!)
    • provide a risk-free environment where publishers are safe to leverage the billions of dollars that they’ve collectively invested into their brands
  • Let’s get connected!  Work together to solve these problems.  Because… if we can, there are over $200BN more dollars waiting for us!

Beautiful Minds

March 25th, 2011

Devan Fearman

As you may have already read, we’ve hired three seasoned business leaders to join the Rubicon Project family: Nick Hulse, Bill Harries and Bill McHargue. As our focus and energy is being spent on growing our business from a great publisher product (yield optimization) to a great publisher platform, we’re certain these guys have the background and experience to help do just that.

We also made a few internal executive promotions. Company founder, Craig Roah, has been promoted to the role of President; Josh Wexler to Senior Vice President, Market Development; and Seizo Welch to Senior Vice President of Finance. These gentlemen have been instrumental in our growth and success to date. And now with a full team in place, our management team is completely supported – enabling them to focus on taking our company to great heights.

Needless to say, it’s an exciting time to be at the Rubicon Project. And before we throw Nick, Bill Harries and Bill McHargue into the thick of things, we wanted to hear why they decided to join the Rubicon Project family. Here is what they had to say:

Bill Harries: “The Rubicon Project is a great example of how the advances in internet technology over the last 15 years is making possible revolutionary changes in the way technology can be applied to today’s business problems.  Matching online advertising inventory with the buyers that want to buy that inventory is screaming for automation.  Applying technology to this problem lets us maximize the revenue for the publishers while protecting their brand, increase the effectiveness of the advertising dollars spent, all the while saving time and effort for all concerned in the process.  These types of innovations represent the future of information technology and it makes Rubicon an exciting place to be.”

Bill McHargue: “I decided to join the Rubicon Project because the company scored off the charts relative to three main decision criteria. 1) People. Its not often you find companies after the initial start up years and such hyper growth, including 3 acquisitions, a company that can maintain a great culture. The people at the Rubicon Project are the best in the advertising technology space. People with passion build great companies. 2) Product. Personally, Sales is no where without a rock-solid product. The Rubicon Project pioneered the space of yield optimization and REVV continues to be the world’s largest market place for buying and selling advertising across the Internet. The company’s milestones of achievement speak volumes to both our customers and our dedicated work force.  3). Opportunity. The company’s road map and vision for the future are truly exciting. The path ahead of us is remarkable and I am fortunate to be a part of the team to help realize those goals.”

And as Nick shared with us in the press release: “I am delighted to be joining the Rubicon Project team. I come to this role with a deep appreciation of the work that the team has done to evolve the company into a market leader and I’m truly excited to be part of an organization that has a very promising future. I will be focused on enhancing an already customer-centric organization with a strategy for increased support, service and innovation for our premium publishers, enabling them to grow their businesses as a result of using the REVV platform.”

Welcome aboard, guys!

FACT: RTB-enabled Sites saw 37% Lift Year Over Year, 25% Greater Lift on Average. Do You RTB?

February 9th, 2011

Mark McEachran

the Rubicon Project launched REVV Protected RTB 1.0 last year to enable publishers to leverage all the benefits of real-time bidding while ensuring their direct sales channels, pricing and site visitors remain safe. Since then, our team has gathered valuable insight and feedback from publishers and demand channel partners on the benefits and risks associated with RTB. In addition, our business intelligence analysts have spent a great deal of time combing through the data from these first six months of programmatic buying in the REVV Marketplace.

As Product Manager of REVV Protected RTB at the Rubicon Project, I have had direct access and feedback on this information. I’ve shared some of my insight on the RTB topic with recent posts such as “Using Dynamic Price Floors to Protect Publisher Value” and “the RTB Primer.”After some positive feedback (and our marketing team identifying my passion for writing), I felt inclined to keep writing.

Today, along with the Rubicon Project team, I’m happy to share our latest free Market Intelligence report: “Mechanics of RTB.” The report explores the world of real-time bidding (RTB) as it relates to publishers of premium websites, and the monetization strategies that incorporate RTB to bring publishers the most revenue possible across all sales channels.

Highlights of the white paper include:

  • The impact of RTB for publishers who include it as part of a holistic yield optimization mix (400% increase in Q410 spend);
  • The CPM effect: eCPMs on RTB-enabled inventory on average 143% greater than those paid by non-RTB buyers;
  • The Lift Factor: RTB-enabled sites saw 37% lift year over year, or 25% greater revenue lift on average than sites that did not include real-time bidding in their optimization mix.

Click here to download the free report (scroll the bottom of the Market Intelligence page & find “Mechanics of RTB” under Best Practices).I hope you find it useful. Of course, if you have an feedback or comments – I’d love to hear them.

Sensible Do-Not-Track

February 1st, 2011

Duc Chau

Recently Google and Mozilla each announced its plans to roll out its own user opt out systems, joining Microsoft which announced its plans back in December, allowing consumers to opt out of behavioral targeting. Both announcements follow the FTC’s December staff report’s recommendation of a “do-not-track” mechanism. This, of course, has caused much debate among the industry and uncertainty about how this can best be implemented to ensure the future health of the online advertising ecosystem.

In online advertising, the trust relationship starts with consumers and publishers. Just like in eCommerce where consumers decide where to spend their money and which stores they trust, consumers should have the same choices with publishers. Publishers offer value to consumers in the form of content, community, information and entertainment, and consumers can choose the sites they visit. In short, consumers can make the choice of which publishers to trust. In contrast, consumers shouldn’t have to know all of the companies that work behind the scenes to deliver online ads – it’s hard enough for those of us working in the ad tech space to keep track of its complexity; seems a little absurd to ask consumers to do the same.

If consumers form a trust relationship with a publisher, it’s up to the publisher and its partners to ensure that trust is respected across all of the advertising, tracking, targeting and data collection done on that site. As publishers take ownership in providing a safe and respectful environment for consumers, the value of ads placed on a publisher’s site will increase – reaching the ultimate goal for consumers: keeping the internet, and the vast majority of publisher content, free.

Let’s revisit the ecommerce example. Consumers purchase through Amazon (and purchase and purchase and purchase) because they feel confident that they can entrust Amazon with their account and payment information. The trust is between the consumer and Amazon, not between the consumer and Amazon’s payment processing, shipping partners, or any other third party companies or organizations.

the Rubicon Project’s approach to the do-not-track initiative is modeled after this relationship: to do right by our publishers, as a technology platform and partner for our publishers, we are committed to innovating and developing leading technology that allows  publishers to give protection to consumers . We are committed to enabling publishers to offer controls and transparency to their users, and commit to working with only demand partners who offer the same level of consumer transparency. It’s part of our job to empower publishers to be able to uphold their end of the consumer trust equation, and it’s something we’ve long been committed to.

Why does this make sense? Because it works for consumers and it’s the only sensible approach we see. It works for publishers who will have a more valuable and closer relationship with consumers, their customers, and closer control over the consumer experience on their site, and ultimately more valuable ad inventory. By adopting an approach that benefits all, we can all move forward with innovations that make online advertising more effective, more desirable, and more valuable to consumers and therefore the industry.

As a company, we continue to take the responsibility for ensuring that appropriate security measures are taken to protect both publishers and consumers from inappropriate use of data. Working alongside industry peers, we’ll continue to build out our own brand protection, security and privacy platform to help verify that the other behind-the-scenes companies we interact with are respecting consumer trust. What we don’t want is a do-not-track technology that tempts consumers to opt-out of everything because it’s too difficult to figure out what else to do. Opting out of everything will hurt publishers, advertisers, and will have a direct negative impact on consumers in the short and long-term. The ad industry, all of us, needs to do better to support consumer preference and improve (and communicate) the clear and simple benefits of ads targeted at unique users.

the Rubicon Project maintains that self-regulation and industry innovation, as opposed to legislation, is the best approach for the industry and consumers alike. As a company, we are fully dedicated toward embracing best practices that are respectful of consumers and complying with industry standards; feel free to take a look at our privacy policy, and take advantage of your right to transparency if you’d like. And please, stay tuned for continuous updates from us on the privacy front.

Securing The Publisher, Serving The Publisher

January 24th, 2011

Josh Wexler

Today’s AdExchanger post – “Securing The Publisher, Serving The Marketer” – has got it half right.  The deck has been stacked against publishers for too long. But the only point when publishers will ultimately be secure is when publisher technology serves their needs – and isn’t just working to “grab” their inventory.

Marketers have benefited from billions of dollars invested in advertiser-centric tools. An explosion of third party buyers, audience technologies, exchanges, and platforms have brought meaningful dollars to the ecosystem (as John Ebbert notes in his AdExchanger post, “today’s big, ad tech ecosystem has been cranking out demand-biased (for the most part) innovation at a steady clip”).  This is good.  Yet premium publishers have not seen the majority of the value created by these technologies.  Not even close.  This is bad.

In the Rubicon Project Manifesto, we state: “Publishers need technology engineered specifically for their needs.  We believe that in doing right by publishers, we will do well for the entire digital advertising ecosystem.”

At ground level, this means developing tools and technology that serve publishers every step of the way.  Our role is to build tools that enable publishers to implement their own unique business rules.  This cuts across:

  • optimization technology at yield and campaign levels;
  • audience analytics and targeting technology capable of leveraging all sources of data;
  • security to protect users from malvertising and a publisher’s sales team from channel conflict and price erosion;
  • automation across every facet of the business to drive friction out and value up.

Publishers do have choices today, and that’s good news. The question that remains is whether the tools and platforms premium publishers are considering are engineered to their specifications, or to the specifications of companies whose ultimate goal is to serve the marketer and ONLY the marketer. There is no company today focused on the needs of publishers who combines the technology and scale of the Rubicon Project’s REVV Platform. Want an ecosystem that truly thrives? Secure the publisher, serve the publisher.

Using Dynamic Price Floors to Protect Publisher Value

January 18th, 2011

Mark McEachran

I was reading a recent post on AdExchanger, “Smoking the RTB Weed,” about a Real-time bidding paper Metamarkets was gearing up to present at an industry event and it got me thinking… (n.b. If you’re not already familiar with RTB, you might want to start with my earlier post on the topic to get up to speed. This post is pretty ‘inside baseball.’)

There’s a lot concern in the online ad ecosystem around the disparity of data between publishers and advertisers. These are not new concerns but they are attracting a lot of attention due to the opportunity that Real-Time Bidding (RTB) presents in leveling the playing field. Historically advertisers have been incentivized to understand the audience behind the publisher in order to maximize their yield. This has led to a large investment in technology to serve the advertiser, tilting the balance of information to their favor and leading to rampant arbitrage.  As a result, most impressions are still sold without adequate protection.

Real-Time Bidding affords the publisher an opportunity to rebalance the terms of the sale of inventory. In fact, in many ways the savvy, well-armed publisher can leverage RTB to gain an advantage in that each impression is evaluated and assigned a value by several buyers.  During an auction only one buyer can purchase the impression, but the data gathered from the other buyers is not discarded, rather it is captured by the publisher (or in our customers’ case, by REVV) and stored for analysis and pricing determination on all future bids.

One form of that analysis is auction simulation.  Using a Hadoop cluster and proprietary algorithms the REVV platform simulates the auction at different price floors, usually at penny increments between five cents and 20 dollars.  During the simulation the system records the revenue gained for each impression whether it goes to the highest bidder at the second price, at the floor price or even if the floor prices out all bids and the impression goes to a non-RTB demand source.  After the simulation another algorithm runs through the revenue at each floor and determines at which floor price the revenue is maximized.  These simulations are run at different levels of audience granularity and the resulting, boiled data is stored.

REVV pricing intelligence algorithms draw on this data whenever a publisher has configured a segment of their inventory to use a dynamic floor.  The publisher has the option to choose a price range for that inventory and REVV responds by providing the optimal floor within that range. If the publisher doesn’t choose to set their own price range, REVV will make a price range recommendation based on the bid price and volume distribution. Either way, new floors are constantly set and re-set for the inventory in response to changes in demand.

Dynamic Price Floors is just one of the ways that the REVV platform empowers the publisher to claim higher yield from their inventory, and reclaim balance in the marketplace. We’re excited to announce that we’ve released enhanced Dynamic Pricing Floor technology today, and we’ll use this space to keep our customers and partners up to date on the results we see in the weeks and months ahead.

Optimizing for 2011

November 19th, 2010

Devan Fearman

What a year it’s been, both here at the Rubicon Project and across our industry. As we witnessed among publishers leveraging the REVV platform and recorded in a few of our past market reports – the industry has continued to see growth in advertising spend throughout the year.  In Q2 alone, the Rubicon 20 Index, a measure of performance across a number of factors (including CPM, revenue and traffic volume) on a roster of twenty of the Web’s most heavily-trafficked properties, rose 47 percent  since the start of 2010.  And this trend has been echoed by numerous industry research firms. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) recently released a report with PriceWaterhouseCoopers, finding ad revenues up by 17 percent in Q3, reaching $6.4 billion.

Looking ahead to 2011, eMarketer predicts total U.S. online ad spend will reach $27.2 billion, which is no surprise. With the market innovations we and our industry peers continue to deliver to the industry, we firmly believe that overall display market is becoming more efficient and effective. As such, we expect marketers to continue to drive more dollars toward display advertising in order to reach hundreds of millions of consumers around the world.

That said, factors both new and old will affect Q1 spend. Historically, seasonal market factors influence online advertising revenue most significantly between Q4 & Q1 as holiday campaigns close out, budgets for the New Year take time to ramp up and the overall market tends to drop in January. We anticipate this will be true again in 2011.

There are certainly economic factors that will impact online advertising revenue in Q1, and while we’re optimistic, we can’t pretend to know exactly what’s coming. Between our strong partnerships and direct access to over 600 ad networks, exchanges and DSPs that access audience and inventory through the REVV Marketplace, we know many advertisers have not yet set their Q1 budgets for 2011 – potentially slowing already reduced first quarter spending.

On the flip side, reports continue to suggest that brands are moving dollars away from traditional media and onto the more measurable online access points to publisher inventory, including real-time bidding (RTB). For these reasons, no one knows what kind of impact we may see in Q1. The number of demand partners in the marketplace has nearly doubled year over year, which could also make the seasonal Q1 decline less impactful. All those variables aside, it is possible that in the early part of the quarter some publishers will experience diminished fill rates and CPM rate drops. In years past, an upward tick begins midway through the quarter; the same will likely be true in 2011.

As a partner to more than 350 premium publishers and the developer of REVV, the technology platform that powers the largest display ad marketplace in the world, the Rubicon Project is taking steps to ensure continued revenue growth for publishers in the new year. Through the REVV Marketplace, premium publishers are exposed to the maximum number of demand channels possible – which will help drive higher revenue. And different from previous years, publishers may also minimize the seasonal impact of Q1 by  leveraging Protected RTB™ 1.1 technology as an additional demand channel.

The graph below expresses, with 2.5 years of historical pricing data captured through the REVV Yield Optimization platform, the seasonal impacts of CPMs throughout the year. All variables remaining constant (traffic fluctuations, user session length, RTB, ad types and sizes, advertiser block lists, geography and other macro-economic variables) January is clearly the lowest paying month of the year trending upward for the remainder of the year and ending on a high note in December with CPM’s at 53% higher than January. Additionally, while ad spend is lower at the beginning of each quarter, there is consistent upward pressure driving CPMs higher quarter over quarter.

Are You Armed for the Holidays?

November 19th, 2010

Duc Chau

Just as a homeowner needs insurance to protect her against unforeseen disasters, a publisher needs to be sure their business and users are protected from malvertising. These attacks peak on weekends and holidays, when technical experts aren’t around to identify the source. In almost all cases, identification and resolution of the malware attack doesn’t happen until considerable
damage has already been done. And regardless of the technique used by the perpetrators, or the channel through which the exploit occurred (we’ve seen them through ad networks and direct-sold campaigns in equal measure), the problem for a publisher’s ad operations group is the same.

A publisher that doesn’t have protection in place is at the greatest risk of malvertising and infecting their most valuable commodity – their users.  We know firsthand from these publishers that it’s not worth playing the odds. Every minute that a threat goes undetected, more and more of a publisher’s user base is affected, resulting in angry users, decreased brand trust and significant churn in both users and revenue.

Since we rolled out SiteScout AdStream Protection™ 5.2 this summer, we’ve seen some surprising – and scary – things:

  • 89 billion ad impressions monitored
  • More than 63 million monthly unique users at risk from exploits prevented by SiteScout technology
  • The majority of exploits have occurred on weekends

With publisher revenue at its peak in Q4, ad streams are at even greater risk. Threats and attacks find their way in through ad exchanges, ad networks and direct ad campaigns where bad guys use many techniques including hacking servers, submitting malicious ads directly, or impersonating legitimate people or companies, and publishers eager to capture increased ad spend that accompanies the holidays might be more busy than usual, and less likely to double-check the validity of a buyer. Fewer resources, more vacation days, and more hectic schedules create a perfect storm for risk of malware.

No one likes these kinds of surprises. To learn more about malvertising and what you can do to keep your site safe, download our free whitepaper, “Best Practices: Malware & Online Security.”

Making it Rain

November 12th, 2010

Devan Fearman

Things are buzzing here at the Rubicon Project. It’s been about two weeks since completing our FAN acquisition and the two teams are integrating seamlessly (well, except for the extra long line at the espresso machine).   In our last blog post, we mentioned that the Rubicon Project achieved profitability in October.  This is a milestone that the team is very proud of.  Not only did we achieve profitability, but we achieved it almost a full quarter ahead of plan.  Further, profitability was achieved outside any revenues from FAN.

Reaching this turning point deserves a nod to the publishers leveraging our REVV platform. Our business model is simple – we only make money if the publisher is making money. As such, reaching profitability is a direct result of the success publishers have achieved on the platform. And we would be remise to not thank all 350+ publishers who continue to trust our technology and team – so, THANK YOU!

It’s been a wild ride. the Rubicon Project has attained great scale in its short life.  We work with over 600 ad networks, 350+ premium publishers, 25 DSPs and 5 exchanges.  Our ad optimization technology reaches 550 million unique users which enables us to process 60 billion transactions each month.  All of this volume generates over $100 million in revenue annually.  We project that this will grow to $200 million in 2011.

Looking to the future, we have embraced Real Time Bidding.  While we have only had the technology in place for 3 months, the Rubicon Project will process 500 billion real time bids this quarter.  A recent enhancement to our RTB engine made during our last company hack day has resulted in a 25% increase in RTB revenue.  Our investment in RTB will continue to pay dividends as more publishers take advantage of the opportunities that this technology presents.  We are building on our past successes while continuing to invest in the future.  It’s truly an exciting time to be at the Rubicon Project.

The RTB Primer

October 13th, 2010

Mark McEachran

Real-Time Bidding (RTB) might seem like old hat already, but there are still many misconceptions out there about how it actually works. It seems that there’s not a ton of material out there that explains RTB in a straightforward manner; until now.

The market explains RTB as sales channel where advertisers bid on their desired ad impressions, with the targeted impression going to the highest bidder. RTB ad serving is made possible through APIs shared among networks, exchanges and optimization platforms that dictate detailed transaction conditions.

While RTB’s value to publishers seems enticing as access to more demand sources equates to increased publisher revenue, the risks, however less apparent, are significant. Because RTB gives advertisers their desired audience at the lowest possible price, publishers are at risk of downward pricing pressure – and net negative revenue impact – resulting from the buy-side’s increased efficiency .

It’s for this very reason that the Rubicon Project recently launched the REVV Protected RTB 1.0 beta. I’ll explain how the REVV for publishers ™ 3.2 Yield Optimization platform handles Protected RTB at a high level to paint a clearer, basic picture.

How Bidding Works
A quick note – as you read through the following, bear in mind that the entire process described in the paragraphs below takes place in less than 80 milliseconds. For perspective, it takes about 300-400 milliseconds to blink an eye.

Let’s start with the ad request. This is the same ad request (a request from a publisher to fill a given ad impression) that would come in without Protected RTB engaged.  The REVV ad engine checks the rules for that impression to see if it is eligible to receive real-time bids (the system calls that “Protected RTB enabled”) and which Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) should get exposure to it, per the publisher’s permission control settings (we currently work with a number of DSPs including AppNexus, Turn, Triggit, MediaMath, DataXu, Quantcast and Media6Degrees).  If the impression is Protected RTB enabled, then the REVV ad engine packages the pertinent information about the impression and anonymized user information (no personally identifiable information) and sends to REVV’s real-time bid system.

The bid system receives the request from the ad engine, unpacks it and creates distinct request packages for each DSP.  Each bid request package includes information the DSP needs to make a decision whether to bid, including basic information about the site, the anonymized user information and ad itself parameters like dimensions and acceptable creative types. These request packages are all in a standard format defined for the REVV Protected RTB platform; each DSP has implemented the communication protocol according to REVV’s API specification.

How DSPs Respond to Bids
As mentioned, each DSP receives an individual bid request for the impression.  Each DSP has it’s own response to these requests. Most DSPs have some form of business rule working for them to choose an appropriate response.  Some of them are running auctions within their system, others are running rotation based ad serving solutions.  Some are armed with third-party data or their own audience data and algorithms that work in real-time to decide which campaign to bid with and at what price.

Once their proprietary technology has evaluated the bid request, DSPs generally respond to a given bid request in one of two ways.  They return a valid bid with an ad creative and the advertiser name, or they return a bid of 0 or send a non-bid signal, which indicates that they chose not to bid on the impression.  If the response from the bid partner takes too long, REVV will ignore it.  REVV will not let Protected RTB compromise expedient ad serving. Needless to say, in a process called real-time bidding, time is of the essence.

Ad Quality Protection & Real-Time Bids
With bids in hand, the REVV bid system checks each against the publisher’s advertiser block list with Real-Time Advertiser Blocking.  The system not only blocks disallowed advertisers, it also tracks unknown advertisers and reports them to the Rubicon Project’s Ad Operations team for categorization.  Sites can be configured to allow or disallow unknown advertisers.  The bid system packs all the bids for the impression back into a single package and sends it back to the ad engine.

And At Last, the Real-Time Bidding Auction
After all these steps are complete and all viable bids are received, an auction takes place inside the REVV ad engine. All real-time bids are considered against one other; they are also considered alongside all other ad tags and direct campaigns that are eligible to serve on that publisher’s site. This is a critical feature of REVV Protected RTB – by competing against all other potential ad tags (from ad networks, exchanges, and other demand sources), real-time bidders face upward pricing pressure from the most sources of competition for that impression. Only real-time bids that beat out all of these other sources of demand, real-time or otherwise, will win auctions.

Bids also must beat any relevant price floors that are configured for the site.  The auction is “second price” style, which means the winning bidder pays just more than the next highest bidder’s offered prices, or ad tag CPM. Further, CPMs from the REVV yield optimization engine act as bids within the decision process, helping to preserve the fair market value of publisher inventory.  The winning RTB ad, ad tag or direct campaign is delivered to the site, and more specifically to the user, in around 80ms from request to delivery. The ad shows up just like any other ad from REVV with one difference.  Protected RTB ads have the price encoded on the ad request.  This mechanism sends the signal back to the DSP communicating that their ad won the auction and lets them know what the clearing price is.

As a result, REVV Protected RTB 1.0 is allowing publishers to leverage all the benefits of real-time bidding while ensuring their direct sales channels, pricing and site visitors remain safe.

To learn more about the Protect RTB™ 1.0 beta product and our overall REVV platform, click here.

Where will you find the Rubicon Project over the next 2 months? Here’s the skinny …

August 2nd, 2010

Rachel Richards

First stop … Sonoma, California for the AdMonsters US Publisher Forum on August 15-18! Please be sure to look for Ward Flock, Director of Publisher Development and Tom Weedon, VP of Publisher Services, in their black and red Rubicon gear. Ward and Tom are excited to mingle with the group on Sunday night, learn more about Publisher’s challenges in the market and share some of the industry trends we have seen in 2010.  Of course, you’ll also find them at Monday night’s cocktail hour and dinner. Sonoma here we come!

Next up … a nonstop September! First things first, hallo Germany! Our international team will be hitting the conference floor at DMEXCO in Germany on September 15-16. You’ll find us in booth space G-053 with plenty of collateral surrounding our technology, products & services. In addition to this, our VP and GM of International, Jay Stevens, will be presenting a Rubicon Project overview and showcasing our award winning yield optimization platform, REVV.

Following DMEXCO, our international team will make the trek back to London for ad:tech UK. On September 22nd at 10:30am, don’t miss Ben Trenda, VP of US Demand, present “Get Real: How RTB and DSPs Impact the Online Advertising Industry.” Ben and team will also be working the conference floor – meeting and mingling with industry leaders interested in learning more about the Rubicon Project (and of course, sharing a few pints of beer with current customers and partners).

Just when you thought we couldn’t possibly be traveling anywhere else in September, guess again. Off to New York Advertising Week we go! You’ll find a few Rubicon Project team members at IAB MIXX on September 27th & 28th – look for the black shirts around booth #118. Last, but certainly not least, we’ll be in the fine presence of AdMonsters once again at the OPS Forum on September 30th. It is here that our very own, Josh Wexler, will be introducing Gordon McLeod, President of The Wall Street Journal Digital Network. Although this is the first OPS event AdMonsters has put on, we are sure it is going to be a success and look forward to seeing our industry peers in attendance. Rumor has it the tickets for this event will increase by September 1st, so be sure to register TODAY!

If you’ll be attending any of these events and are interested in setting up a meeting with a Rubicon Project team member, please email events@rubiconproject.com.