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October 19, 2007

YieldBuild Will Try To Optimize AdSense, Pay You More

Nick Gonzalez

37 comments »

yieldbuild_logo.gifSimply slapping AdSense on your site is one of the easiest, but not necessarily best, ways to monetize your website. There are a lot of factors that go into getting the most out of your ad units. They range from placement, color, ad network, or even time of day. Each of these factors can affect ad performance

YieldBuild, a new service from the company that launched HubPages, will take a stab at optimizing those ad units for you. It’s similar to the Rubicon Project, a highly rated ad optimization platform in beta that finds the best mix of ad network and demographic data. However, YeildBuild has a focus on layout and design.

It uses computer algorithms to automatically optimize your site’s ad spots with the most profitable combination of ad layout, style, and network. The system continually tests alternative configurations of layouts, networks, and color, looking for the highest performing ones. You can see a timeline of the system substituting ads below. It takes about 100,000 impressions to train the system. As users become unresponsive to the ads, the system is supposed to switch in a more profitable combination of layout and networks.

They’ve been privately beta testing the system with some fairly well known startups and saw improvements of 50% to over 100% in effective CPM rates on user profile pages. They’re currently looking for more beta testers to try the system out on.


yieldbuild_screen.png

Yield Build
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This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2007 at 11:29 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. Meg H.

    October 20th, 2007 at 12:25 am

    Just discussed in the forums.

    Adsense alternatives
    http://forums.techcrunch.com/f.....p;tstart=0

    Thanks for the info.

  2. Rajeev

    October 20th, 2007 at 12:26 am

    wow,

    AI optimisation to blog revenue.

    Must give it a try.

  3. Anand

    October 20th, 2007 at 12:26 am

    Is optimization all that matters? I do realize the ‘prime real estate’ of my blog that will get the maximum hits. But I dare not advertise there since I do not want to put off my readers by force-feeding them ads.

    I guess the ‘computer algorithm’ part is more of a weakness than a strength for YieldBuild

  4. What's Hot Today.com

    October 20th, 2007 at 1:37 am

    Hopefully this works better than Adsense. Not exactly sold on Adsense. It’s a little too complicated.

  5. Amar Goel

    October 20th, 2007 at 1:39 am

    Hi,

    You might also check out PubMatic ( http://PubMatic.com ) . PubMatic is a service that optimizes between your ad networks (works with all the leading ad networks) as well as uses complex machine learning based algorithms to do color optimization for AdSense and YPN.

    PubMatic was featured at TechCrunch40 and publishers have seen 100% improvements in revenue. Please try it out.

    Thanks,
    Amar

  6. rohman

    October 20th, 2007 at 5:27 am

    may it will be better than adsense.

  7. Venkat

    October 20th, 2007 at 5:38 am

    Amar,

    Looks like you have something interesting to catch up.

    I think if you can add layout configuration and demographic data as additional variables in your system, it will have more than 100% improvements in revenues. What say?

  8. sputnick

    October 20th, 2007 at 6:17 am

    Adsense is still untouchable. It’s not just about ratcheting up the clickthrus. It’s about administration and execution. Only Google can send you your money anywhere in the world, no matter where you are.

  9. Michael Bailey

    October 20th, 2007 at 7:56 am

    sputnick, I think that you have Google confused with FedEx.

  10. Jon

    October 20th, 2007 at 8:38 am

    How long you figure before Google releases something like this of their own? I am sure deep in the basements of Google HQ, they got something like this already well into testing… just waiting for an opportunity to be unleashed to the masses.

    Jon

  11. S.Siddiqui

    October 20th, 2007 at 8:44 am

    and now as TechCrunch has featured this service. So it should be getting the fame they dreamed of..!

    nofullstop[dot]com

    sorry but had to Leave my URL this way as it is being blocked by akismet. I dont know why?? I am not a BOT :(

  12. denver

    October 20th, 2007 at 9:12 am

    i am going to try it…Everyone is willing to earn more money, but I really like google adsense, since it has plenty of advertisers

  13. Thinker

    October 20th, 2007 at 9:30 am

    Well, I think there will be lot of small companies that will launch in these arena. It’s good in a way as the singular dependency on adsense will finally go away. Ad sense as it is pays peanuts for ads. They might pay almonds! LOL what a funny joke(read being sarcastic)!

  14. Stanley Wong

    October 20th, 2007 at 9:32 am

    Looks to be built on a simple Taguchi Multivariate Testing (MVT) algorithm. The Taguchi method is perfect for something like this.

    This is not new. There are other companies that offer something similar to this for quite a while. For example:
    Vertster - http://www.vertster.com/
    SiteTuners - http://www.sitetuners.com/

    The promise with new startups like the Rubicon Project is to do these types of optimizations automatically. There are a lot of inefficiencies in Internet Advertising.

  15. steve ballmer

    October 20th, 2007 at 10:07 am

    Too little too late, Microsoft is getting into ads, we will do it right!

    http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

  16. Anne H

    October 20th, 2007 at 10:18 am

    One item people may want to remember is that it takes time for these systems to optimize. Your AdSense revenue may decline until the system has been trained. People may want to make sure they’re comfortable with the time frame by figuring how long it takes your site to get the 100,000 impressions.

    You may also see some interesting color combinations as well.

  17. Otis Gospodnetic

    October 20th, 2007 at 11:01 am

    How come TechCrunch itself is not using this, if it’s that good? (not saying it is not, just asking an obvious question)

  18. Tim Jones

    October 20th, 2007 at 11:30 am

    Wow - something featured on TechCrunch that actually might be useful. :-) Seriously, if they can indeed boost publishers revenues by 50-100%, they are going to have a lot of business on their hands.

    Not clear what their revenue model is though. Do they take a cut of the increased revenues they create for publishers? That would seem fair.

    How long till Google buys them?

  19. Paul Edmondson

    October 20th, 2007 at 11:30 am

    I want to clarify that YieldBuild is what we call a behavioral formatting yield optimization engine. It works with your existing AdSense account, so you will still get paid by Google or the other ad networks we support. YieldBuild will help you recognize their true earning potential.

    At its core, YieldBuild increases the performance of Ad networks like Ad
    Sense, eBay AdContext and YPN by setting up zones in your pages that will be tested and retested to yield the highest effective CPMs. All of the ad placement and formatting attributes (color, size, borders, link color etc.) is done automatically. The net result is publishers earn substantially more money and they don’t have to run test manually which saves time. And since YieldBuild is a web service that is as simple as adding a little javascript to a page,we are constantly monitoring the performance of the set of ads getting served, so if ad blindness sets in, the ad layouts will be automatically adjusted.

    Thank you to everyone that has applied to our private beta. The response has been incredible!

    Paul Edmondson
    CEO

  20. kid mercury

    October 20th, 2007 at 11:34 am

    i’m very bearish on this. the next step is in blurring the distinction between content and ads, and making ads a fundamental part of the user experience. this requires a lot of knowledge about the business objectives and the target market — knowledge that is very hard to automate and analyze (unless you’re google).

  21. Shams

    October 20th, 2007 at 12:30 pm

    Something new is fine, but will techcrunch be the first one to display the ads?

  22. ella chloe

    October 20th, 2007 at 12:50 pm

    wonder why is hubpages going into the ad optimization biz from their original business of a content publishing platform. Is that area not hot anymore. any insights?

  23. David

    October 20th, 2007 at 2:38 pm

    Let’s give it a shot. Adsense isn’t that great, all my buddies and I got suspended for no reason even we did not cheat; and we cannot disbute or.

  24. Paul Edmondson

    October 20th, 2007 at 2:53 pm

    Ella Chloe, Publishers on HubPages have enjoyed YieldBuild as the monetization engine for several months. Everybody that publishes on hubpages.com gets YieldBuild as part of the platform. HubPages.com continues to do well. It’s now about 3.4 million monthly visitors and growing.

    Now publishers can run the YieldBuild monetization engine on their own sites. I posted an earlier comment clarifying a few points about YieldBuild. Perhaps it needs to be approved before it will show up in the comments here.

    Paul Edmondson
    CEO

  25. Patrick

    October 20th, 2007 at 7:42 pm

    I would really need these info because i’m new at blogging…

    maybe you guys would have suggestions with regards to my ads…

    http://www.patrickmontes.net/realitybites
    http://www.patrickmontes.net/giftbox
    http://www.patrickmontes.net

  26. The Business of Software

    October 20th, 2007 at 10:07 pm

    Interesting

  27. Three Blog

    October 21st, 2007 at 3:07 am

    Adsense is vital for many blogger and anything which will optimise and increase adsense revenue is a good idea in my book.

  28. Curious George

    October 21st, 2007 at 9:16 am

    @Paul Edmonson:
    What does YieldBuild get out of helping publishers? What is the business model? Ah, the 3%.
    What stops the publisher for using YB for training and figuring out the optimal layout and quitting YB after that? Sure, any further optimization will stop, but if in 30 days things get optimized enough…. and if they do not get optimized enough, then that’s bad for you - 30 days is a long time!

  29. Voices.com

    October 21st, 2007 at 11:57 am

    Paul,

    Good work. You’ve done a tremendous job with HubPages, so I’m sure you’ll crack the code for YieldBuild too.

    Have you closed for beta testing already? I only saw a “sign in” page and no “sign up” info.

  30. Mitch

    October 21st, 2007 at 8:17 pm

    Well this is something new for me to blog about. However what scares me is the part of the article that says it takes Yield Build about 100k impressions to train the system. 100k impressions isn’t pocket change for many webmasters, especially new ones that are just starting out. Will this program help small time bloggers or is it specifically targeting only people with high traffic by stating that impression count?

    Also the comment from Curious George is also valid too. What is to stop people from using the product, copying the layout of the ads once they’ve been optimized, and then quiting the program? People abusing the program like that will eventually force Yieldbuild to apply a starting fee later on.

  31. Joe DiPasquale

    October 21st, 2007 at 9:31 pm

    We’ve been using YieldBuild on http://www.CollegeWikis.com - I encourage people to try it out.

  32. BuzzillionsJim

    October 22nd, 2007 at 1:54 pm

    Hey , what about getting Google Website Optimizer (Google’s own testing product) to work with AdSense ;)

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