New York based alternative advertising meta-network Right Media closed $45 million in Series B funding today. The service auctions ad space between multiple ad networks in real time. Yahoo! lead the round and will take 20% of the company. In June of 2005 Right Media received $7.25 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures. Redpoint was also a participant in this round.
We profiled Right Media in August when the company released a lightweight version of its advertising marketplace called RMX Direct.
Right Media’s system allows website publishers to participate in multiple ad networks and automatically display ads from whichever network will pay the highest price per impression for their ad space in real time bidding. The company says that more than 2 billion impressions are traded daily through its service. The service includes a filtering system to prevent malware distribution through ads and enforces publisher criteria. Publishers are able to exercise very granular control over what ads run on their sites.
Automated bidding includes factors like geographic location of each impression and conversion rates for the site and user (cookies). Bidding goes on in real time relative to predetermined campaigns - the enterprise version of Right Media currently runs 30,000 auctions per second.
In August Right Media had 50 ad networks participating in its enterprise edition and 8 in its version for small publishers. Critics questioned whether Right Media would be a useful service without major ad networks participating in their service, though that criticism could only be raised concerning the small publisher service. Right Media’s enterprise component has participants that include Fox Interactive, Tribune and Looksmart. Yahoo! clearly supports the model and will be auctioning non-premium ad space of its own through Right Media.
The timing is right for Yahoo! to do something in the ad space. The company’s stock plummeted and hasn’t recovered since slumping ad revenues from big auto and financial services ad buyers were publicly discussed mid September. More bad news came from Yahoo! today - a reported 38% drop in third quarter profits. Leveraging an auction system for non-premium ad space could help shore up some of the holes emerging in the company’s ad strategy. In addition to leveraging low traffic pages, a stake in Right Media could help strike a blow against click fraud. Real time bidding could respond rapidly to low conversion rates by dropping bids automatically.
Any info on the number of advertisers using RM and its revenues so far?
Really good move by Yahoo; this takes them one step ahead of any ads distributor, including themselves.
Is there something like this for smaller web publishers with less than 100,000 impressions monthly?
Yahoo is doing what they should, be under the radar and build the future. They are not hype but they are actually investing in what will matter for individuals (i.e blog as personnal billboard but still a billboard) in the future. They are gathering several piece of the virtual identity.
Basicity.com, we do have a product for smaller publishers at Right Media called RMX Direct. Techcrunch profiled it in the “profiled Right Media in August” link up above. You can sign up at http://direct.rightmedia.com.
I think this is something that’s emerging in the industry and will be useful. It’s hard to get access to advertisers if you’ve got a web property and it’s hard for them to know all of the sites they can be on so I think it’s very cool.
One to watch in this would be Blue Lithium - they have out performed Right Media and maybe a good fit for a Google - if they are going to get in the game as well
Blue Lithium and Google? I’m not sure that’s a good fit, esp b/c BL essentially published an attack piece referring to themselves as Google’s adversary (which, btw, is laughable hubris).