Rubicon Project Eliminates Ad Network Selection Headaches For Publishers

Making life easier for publishers struggling to keep up with the explosion of ad networks - now numbering over 300 - and the determination of which network will yield the best results, is the Rubicon Project. Launched eight months ago by Frank Addante, the company, today, announced series B finding of $15 million bringing its total to $21 million.

We've seen a demo of Rubicon and its really fascinating. For a publisher trying to best monetize inventory, Rubicon, in a nutshell, does exactly that. A publisher joins with Rubicon, enters relevant information of their site and, poof, relevant ads are selected from the 300 or so ad networks in the system.

Over 3,000 publishers have signed up to date with publishers seeing between 33 and 300 percent lifts in ad revenue. Rubicon likes to call it "mad cash." Everything is done on the fly and there are endless reports informing the publisher of their campaigns' performance.

The site scales for sites of all sizes from your Dad's blog to sites the size of MSNBC.

With something as cool as this, exclusity doesn't last long. It appears another company, PubMatic, offers a similar service.

WunderLoop: a new dimension in targeting

“Integrated targeting”. All options on a single platform.

INTEGRATED TARGETING DEMO GRAPHIC HERE

* Unites all proven and new real-time targeting methods in one system.
* Integrates the most prominent web analysis and
market research applications.
* Is open for integration of customer-specific data from
CRM and Web/data mining.
* Flexible usage options: on-site, cross-site, as a local installation
or ASP, as a standard version or completely personalised.

wunderloop web site
wunderloop's new web design

With the development of the new Integrated Targeting Platform we have redesigned and updated our website at www.wunderloop.com. The site includes useful facts, figures and data and an improved look and feel.


Latest Innovations
Taking Targeting to a New Dimension:

Behavioural targeting is fast becoming standard practice worldwide. But with new developments come new challenges. Our clients now need to combine a range of different targeting techniques.

With wunderloop’s new Integrated Targeting Platform, for the first time, they can.

The unique platform now incorporates all targeting methods, both new and established in one modular and intuitive framework. Key features include:



- Generic Tagging
- Auto Categorisation & Keyword Extraction
- Predictive Targeting
- Typology Targeting
- Geo Targeting
- Standardised Campaign / Brand Impact Studies
- Reaction Analysis
- Relevancy Weighting
- Two options for accessing the wunderloop Integrated Targeting Platform



Generic Tagging:
wunderloop technology enables amazingly quick and simple integration and categorisation of all websites via a single tag.

Auto Categorization & Keyword Extraction:
Manual site classification used to be a long and laborious process. Not any more. wunderloop technology can now classify every web page automatically, yet allow you to specify your own changes. Article keywords are automatically identified and can be used to target specific interest profiles. Whatever your target identification characteristics, they are automatically ready for use. As results are generated, and users interact with those results, the profiles become more and more exact.


Predictive Targeting:
By cleverly correlating market research and real-time online user data we can create ever more precisely defined target groups while at the same time maximising reach.

Typology Targeting:
wunderloop’s tools allow you to connect behavioural and socio-demographic data to target standardised or individually matched target types. Relevant data from analysis of user and client databases can also be added. The types of clients are defined by a comparison of "average" online and offline client data.

Geo Targeting:
Users can be targeted right down to district and city level, without threatening data privacy - wunderloop never saves an IP address.

Standardised Campaign / Brand Impact Studies:
wunderloop’s integrated standardised analysis enables straightforward assessment of advertising effectiveness. Net result: you can spend the time you save further optimising profiles and making your campaigns still more effective.

Reaction Analysis:
With wunderloop you can now analyse who has actually reacted to an ad and therefore which of the characteristics of your target groups are really important. Similarly, a Pre-Flight allows you to check out different configurations in advance in order to find the most effective formula.


Relevancy Weighting:
Alongside the new, tried and tested wunderloop features such as relevancy weighting are of course still available. The relevance of current user behaviour is assessed and weighted in relation to historical data and in real-time context. Relevancy weighting can be used in targeting to define the strength of interest e.g. in the purchase of an automobile

Google Aims to Make YouTube Profitable With Ads

This is a a smart direction to go in. This form of video advertising is consistent with consumers behavioral interaction in watching TV today. They will now be able to interact with the content/ad overlays. Pre roll is more akin to consumers behavior in seeing ads in a movie theatre before previews.Interesting data for our version of this which will be created with vidQube.If you read the New York Times version it has the ads starting at a $20 CPM HAPPY TIMES!!!

By MIGUEL HELFT

Published: August 22, 2007

Ever since Google bought YouTube last November, it has avoided cluttering the site and the video clips themselves with ads, for fear of alienating its audience.

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A demonstration of an ad for a movie on the bottom of a YouTube video. Real ads would not reflect the content of a video.

Multimedia

Sample Ad Spot Video (youtube.com)

The strategy helped cement YouTube’s position as the largest video Web site but didn’t do much to justify YouTube’s $1.65 billion price tag.

Now Google believes it finally has found the formula to cash in on YouTube’s potential as a magnet for online video advertising and keep its audience loyal at the same time.

The company said late Tuesday that after months of testing various video advertising models, it was ready to introduce a new type of video ad, which it said was unobtrusive and kept users in control of what they saw.

The ads, which appear 15 seconds after a user begins watching a video clip, take the form of an overlay on the bottom fifth of the screen, not unlike the tickers that display headlines during television news programs.

A user can ignore the overlay, which will disappear after about 10 seconds, or close it. But if the user clicks on it, the video they were watching will stop and a video ad will begin playing. Once the ad is over, or if a user clicks on a box to close it, the original video will resume playing from the point where it was stopped.

“What we have come up with is a user-controlled ad format that is engaging,” said Eileen Naughton, Google’s director for media platforms. “We want our users to be able to accept and choose what type of advertising they engage in.”

For now, Google will place the ads only on video clips of its content partners — the more than 1,000 small and large media companies that have licensed their videos to YouTube. By doing so, YouTube will avoid the potential liability of having ads appear on copyrighted clips it is not authorized to display. And it will also prevent ads from playing on clips generated by users whose message may not be to the liking of advertisers.

The revenue from the ads will be split between the media partner and YouTube. Ms. Naughton said Google would charge advertisers $20 for every 1,000 times the ads were displayed. Google said the ads would begin appearing today throughout the site. Ms. Naughton also said advertisers would be able to take aim at specific channels and genres, as well as demographic profiles, geography and hour of the day.

If successful, the video ads could persuade more media companies to license their content to YouTube as a way to make money from it, analysts said.

“Today, YouTube is a sunk cost for Google,” said Darren Aftahi, a securities analyst with ThinkEquity Partners. “If they can couple the proper advertising with the proper content, there is a tremendous opportunity for the company.”

With 51 million users in June, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, YouTube now attracts an audience that is larger than the combined audiences of its three nearest competitors, MySpace, AOL and Yahoo. Its adoption of overlay ads for online video could turn the format into an industry standard, advertising executives said. The video ad market, which is expected to nearly double from last year to $775 million, has been projected to grow to $4.3 billion by 2011, according to eMarketer, a research firm.

But while Google may help popularize the format, it did not invent it. Smaller online video companies, like VideoEgg, a video advertising start-up in San Francisco, have been using similar overlay ads for nearly a year.

Troy Young, VideoEgg’s chief marketing officer, said the goal was to get away from forcing users to watch an ad before showing the clip they wanted to see. Those ads are known as “preroll” and are the most common form of online video advertising so far.

“On the Internet, you have a lot of short-form content, and preroll wasn’t going to work for short content,” Mr. Young said. Mr. Young said that preroll, and “midroll” ads that appear in the middle of a clip, may be appropriate for television shows, movies or other long videos. But overlays have proven effective at making money with short clips, he said. Viewers click on them at a rate roughly five times higher than banner ads, he added.

In tests, YouTube users had clicked on overlays five to 10 times more frequently than on banner ads that already appear on some YouTube pages, Ms. Naughton said. Yahoo has also been testing overlay video ads, creating further momentum for the format.

“We need to be in a place where we have standard overlays and standard measures of engagement across all portals, before the entire preroll industry can shift in any big way,” said Rebecca Paoletti, director of video strategy at Yahoo.

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Big App Acquisition Turns Facebook into 'Real Platform'

'Where I've Been' - monetized by the bonafide 'Platform' Think an app on its own can't be worth $3 million? Apparently the "Where I've Been" application, featured on Facebook, is. Travel company TripAdvisor has shelled out $3 million, the largest Facebook app acquisition to date, for Where I've Been by Craig Ulliott. The acquisition is "the first major successful exit of a Facebook application since the Platform launched," according to Inside Facebook. "This means Facebook is a real platform," said Founder Naval Ravikant of Hitforge. Ravikant, a "Facebook platform" investor, admits to thinking Ulliott sold too early. Nonetheless, "$3M is a great return for the amount of time he invested." Where I've Been has collected 2.3 million users in the handful of months since Facebook first opened to outside apps a few months ago. When the site experienced a deluge of outside applications and a spike in user activity, LinkedIn followed suit. MySpace is also considering the move.

Display Meet Email Ads: Datran Acquires Chintano

Written on

August 8th 2007

Acquiring contextual and behavioral targeting ad network Chintano, Datran Media will be incorporating the site with their existing email based ad network, EO.com.

EO.com was launched this year and was to serve as an email ad network for publishers of newsletters and email lists. These clients can incorporate ads from marketers, but what the firm realized was that there is a demand for site-based display ads. Hence, the acquisition of Chintano.

Chief revenue officer for Datran Media, Sean O’Neal said, “We had been working with Chintano for quite some time to help us explore the display advertising opportunity and the ad network opportunity [and] we had a string synergy with them.”

The company believes that what will ultimately set it apart from its competitors will be the offering of email and display advertising simultaneously. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Tags: ad serving, chintano, datran media, email, eo.com and Web Sites

Nielsen to focus on time spent, not page views, in measuring Web site popularity

The Associated Press

Monday, July 9, 2007

NEW YORK: A leading online measurement service will scrap rankings based on the longtime industry yardstick of page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend at the sites.

The move by Nielsen/NetRatings, expected to be announced Tuesday, comes as online video and new technologies increasingly make page views less meaningful.

Although Nielsen already measures average time spent and average number of sessions per visitor for each site, it will start reporting total time spent and sessions for all visitors to give advertisers, investors and analysts a broader picture of what sites are most popular.

Currently, sites and advertisers often use page views, a figure that reflects the number of Web pages a visitor pulls from a site.

However, Yahoo Inc. and others are increasingly using a software trick called Ajax to improve the user experience. It allows sites to update data automatically and continually, without users needing to pull up new pages. Page views decline as a result.

Page views also drop as people spend more time watching online video at sites like Google Inc.'s YouTube.

"Based on everything that's going on with the influx of Ajax and streaming, we feel total minutes is the best gauge for site traffic," said Scott Ross, director of product marketing at Nielsen. "We're changing our stance on how the data should be" used.

Nielsen will still provide page view figures but won't formally rank them. Ross said page view remains a valid gauge of a site's ad inventory, but time spent is better for capturing the level of engagement users have with a site.

Ranking top sites by total minutes instead of page views gives Time Warner Inc.'s AOL a boost, largely because time spent on its popular instant-messaging software now gets counted. AOL ranks first in the United States with 25 billion minutes based on May data, ahead of Yahoo's 20 billion. By page views, AOL would have been sixth.

Google, meanwhile, drops to fifth in time spent, primarily because its search engine is focused on giving visitors quick answers and links for going elsewhere. By page views, Google ranks third.

In both page views and time spent, Yahoo is ahead of News Corp.'s MySpace and other Fox Interactive Media sites, according to the Nielsen measures.

Yahoo has more than twice the time spent as Fox, but has less than a 10 percent edge in page views. That is because MySpace requires users to pull up a new page anytime they make a change or view a new profile, while Yahoo increasingly uses Ajax to continually pull new data, even if a user stays on the same page all day.

Nielsen's rival, comScore Media Metrix, also has addressed the rise of Ajax with the development of site "visits" — defined as the number of times a person returns to a site with a break of at least a half-hour.

Yahoo Ad Sales Reorg Signals Platform-Agnosticism

by Laurie Petersen, Monday, Jun 25, 2007 6:00 AM ET
BY COMBINING ITS SEARCH AND display ad sales teams under one executive leader--search side's David Karnstedt--Yahoo is catering to what its customers want, but in a platform-agnostic fashion, Karnstedt's boss said last night.
"You will hear more," said Gregory Coleman, Yahoo's executive vice president of global sales, in an interview. "We have a full plan. Today's announcement is a signal to say to everyone that we're serious."
Months in the planning, the reorganization is accompanied by the departure of longtime Chief Sales Officer Wenda Harris Millard, the six-year Yahoo veteran whose new job as president of media for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, starting July 16, was announced separately by that company yesterday.
Millard was on the team that developed the ad sales reorganization plan, knew Karnstedt had been chosen to run it, and opted for the MSLO position rather than take on a global ad sales role for Yahoo, she told Online Media Daily. (See related story.)
"This new structure further solidifies marketers' instincts to plan their search and display campaigns together," said Roger Barnette, president of SearchIgnite, a media management platform specializing in auction-based media, and sister company to 360i. "Additionally, with this news following Yahoo's acquisition of Right Media, Yahoo is laying groundwork to emerge as a leader in providing auction-based media opportunities beyond search marketing so advertisers can achieve the most efficiency with their campaigns."
Coleman said it will take several months to work out the exact integration, but that the timing of the announcement had nothing to do with Millard's new job. Rumors that she would be leaving Yahoo for something new have circulated for weeks, and reverberated even louder last week after Terry Semel stepped down as CEO and was replaced by Co-founder Jerry Yang. Millard, whose profile is best-known on Madison Avenue, is credited with legitimizing Yahoo as a destination for leading brand advertisers. Earlier in her career, she was a founder of the pre-bubble DoubleClick.
"Integrating our world-class search and display sales teams under David's leadership will allow us to better serve all of our advertisers' marketing objectives ranging from brand awareness to direct response," said Sue Decker, president of Yahoo in the official company statement announcing the move. "This is one of many important steps we're taking to re-invigorate our display business, further build on our industry-leading position in advertising, and drive thought-leadership in the online advertising marketplace."
Last Monday, Yahoo said its second-quarter revenues would be closer to the lower end of earlier guidance because of display advertising weakness.
"David Karnstedt has done great things for Yahoo's Search Sales business, and it's his leadership skills, business acumen and keen understanding of the new media landscape that make him the perfect person to help shape the future of Yahoo's advertising sales business," Coleman said.
Karnstedt, who continues to report to Coleman as head of North American sales, joined Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture) in September 2001. He is also a veteran of such pioneering Internet companies as Lycos and Alta Vista.
"By taking a more holistic approach to advertising sales, Yahoo will become a more consultative seller, which should make buying complete solutions easier for our customers across Yahoo and our partner sites," Coleman said.
Yahoo has been seeking to boost its share of advertising business on partner media sites as well. It is supplying both display and search advertising for eBay, and has recently signed deals with Comcast and a consortium of newspapers. Karnstedt will oversee ad sales on all Yahoo properties, including the new One Search mobile platform.
Yahoo made every effort to focus its statements on Karnstedt's elevation rather than Millard's departure, but her decision to leave is a reminder of a new wave of executive departures. Earlier this month, Yahoo's chief technology officer, who led the development of the Panama search marketing platform, put in his last day.

Openads Raises $5M in Series A Funding

from Mashable! by Kristen Nicole

Openads, which has created an open source adserver, has raised $5 million in Series A financing led by Index Ventures, and additional participation from First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

The funding will be used for product development and the expansion of its team. What was originally created to be a technology division within Unanimis, a digital advertising business, Openads has since spun off and has been incorporated as a standalone business. Its service enables publishers to maintain their advertising campaigns with targeting, inventory optimization, rich media forecasting, and can be integrated with at least thirty other leading ad networks around the globe.

The company already has a good line up of advisers and clients, which include Federated Media and Sun Microsystems, establishing Openads as a major player in ad distribution networks. Others with recent advances in ad networks include Google’s new Reports, Media River’s ClickSurge, and to some extent, AdaptiveBlue’s latest Denim release.