The Rubicon Project, a meta ad network that helps Websites place and optimize ads from the hundreds of other ad networks out there, closed a $15 million B round just three months after raising a $6 million A round. Hopefully, they didn’t spend it all already. The B round was led by Mayfield. IDG Ventures Asia, Stanford University, the University of California Berkeley, and Clearstone Venture Partners (which led the A round) participated, as did LowerMyBills founder Matt Coffin.
The company is still in beta and is not charging customers yet, but in the past three months it has served up 4 billion ads and generated more than $1 million in revenues for its beta publishers. It claims beta customers are seeing a 30 percent+ increase in ad revenues, and is trying to figure out how much of that it can take as its fee. Ultimately, the Rubicon Project is a middleman in between a Website and another middleman (the ad network) and, finally, the advertiser. The fact that they think there is a business here speaks to the inefficiencies of the online advertising market. Maybe it is time for online advertising exchanges like Microsoft’s AdECN, which is a stock exchange for ads where buyers and sellers deal with each other directly.
I tryed rubicon, and it was among the worst advertising experience I have ever had. The CPM was less than you would expect from a low third tier CPC (ala- bidvertiser or clicksor) – To top that off, this ‘technology’ has been around for a long time, just not publicized. Every CPM network that I use (CPX/buds, Casale, Tribal fusion, etc..) will automatically optimize the advertisements for maximum CPM. After all, this is essentially what CPM is. Granted they spew some hubaloo about contextual this and that, but in all reality, I did better with mama media than I did with them.
Its sad, but true- The only ones who will take advantage of this is those who have had their adsense accounts disabled for click fraud and cant sign up for it again.
Bottom line- Avoid at all costs.
Interesting that a few universities were represented in the deal. Anyone know if a university has ever lead a venture financing?
http://www.leveragingideas.com
Wow!
15 millions! Not bad…
Thanks Kevin, I trust you’re not a spokesperson for Google (Do they need any at this stage?) . I quess I’ll stick to my AdSense.
http://www.abes...a.wordpress.com
not bad at all.
I used Rubicon as well for one of my sites but they could not get enough ad networks approved for my site so I wasn’t able to get the best out of them. They are good for newcomers who don’t know anything about advertising but are starting to get a ton of traffic. I as well as Kevin understand ad optimization and thats why they couldn’t do anything for me.
To say that Rubicon are “newcomers” who “don’t know anything about advertising” just shows how little you know. Google Frank Addante; he founded L90… later bought by DoubleClick. Educate yourself before mouthing off as if you have a clue.
Hi Kevin,
I’m sure JT, head of our publisher team, would love to hear more (me too!) We’ve heard rave reviews from the publishers in the Rubicon Project private Beta but would welcome more detail into your experience. It sounds, ah, a little counter to what we’ve heard. But, hey, that’s what a private Beta is for! My email is nicole (at) rubiconproject (dot) com. We welcome the feedback. I appreciate your very honest feedback and look forward to talking with you more.
I agree with Erick that there are huge inefficiencies in the online ad market. Though The Rubicon Project is actually trying to solve a different problem – that is “chaining”.
http://www.cent...ding-15-million
Interesting concept i cant see why people would go past google, a lot of these guys seem to resell google ad stock
check this out! http://www.yupnup.com
Nothing groundbreaking here. They have a long way to go to prove their technology works. @kevin, you sound angry, did you get “mad cash”
t
Its sad, but true- The only ones who will take advantage of this is those who have had their adsense accounts disabled for click fraud and cant sign up for it again.
If you don’t have a lot of content, AdSense isn’t necessarily the most impressive solution.
I’ve been using Rubicon for one of my sites that AdSense is terrible at monetizing (and, no, I haven’t been banned from AdSense or anything like that): http://winscrabble.com
I know it’s not the most efficient way to monetize it, but the site is just a side project that I don’t want to spend much time on. Rubicon gave me something like a 10x boost over having AdSense in the 300×250 block (and several others I’ve tried). It’s hard to complain about that.
Our service, YieldBuild, offers a similar service to the Rubicon Project. YieldBuild optimizes your site’s contextual ad layouts, formats and across networks to maximize revenue. In addition to tweaking formats and colors, YieldBuild also tests position within a publisher-specified zone (it will try moving ad units around within a region to see if it makes a difference).
YieldBuild also works with the publishers’ contextual ad accounts; i.e. you continue to get paid via AdSense, YPN, etc., and can continue to monitor your impressions, clicks and revenue through your ad network consoles, in addition to the consolidated reporting interface that YieldBuild has.
Erick’s right, though – the success of and interest in YieldBuild and the Rubicon Project suggests there are large opportunities in this space. The contextual ad industry is getting larger and more complex, and intelligently-designed, automated optimization solutions can help achieve yield gains without the guesswork and manual testing, which are becoming increasingly more difficult to do.
I have also tried using the Rubicon project, and was VERY dissapointed in the results that I was getting. The results were worse than that of even Adbrite as far as my CPM went. Using widgetbucks and yahoo ads seems to be a much more viable source of income for my site compared to an “optimized” advertising program.
I’m JT and I manage our publisher program at the Rubicon Project.
Kevin– thanks for sharing your thoughts. If you would like, I would be happy to talk to you personally. My direct email is jt at rubicon project dot com. You can also contact our care team at care @ rubiconproject dot com. We are constantly looking for ways to improve our product (and no it won’t work perfectly for everyone on day one, but we are serious about learning and making it better.)
All– we are a product in private beta that has set out to solve a fairly complicated challenge– how do you automate and optimize this large, yet highly inefficient market? And how do you do it so that it is really easy for publishers? We are investing millions of dollars in R&D to solve this problem for publishers.
We have done a great job thus far making our technology and service work for large publishers (we work with some of the largest publishers on the web and do quite well for them). We are trying to bring those same learnings and success to smaller publishers (in our view, there is no reason why a smaller publisher shouldn’t have access to the same top quality advertisers or technology as large sites do).
So you know I am not completely making this stuff up, you can check out a few case studies: http://rubiconp...es/zoominfo.com
I look forward to hearing your thoughts/concerns/ideas.
Best,
JT
We tried to use Rubicon for our ads: the experience was dismal. Instead of optimizing ads to countries, perivous websites visited, increasing CPM by shuffling multiple ad networks, Rubicon should concentrate on the content of what they deliver.
On our medical blog, we don’t want to advertise emoticons, or rap artists, or “guess whose lips are these”. And that’s what we’ve got from Rubicon. CPM might be up, but reputation is way way down.
Dr. O–
Sorry you had ad quality issues. We know that is an issue that is very important to publishers. I recently wrote a forum post about our experience with ad quality: https://www.rub...thread.php?t=54
As I mentioned above, please feel free to contact me personally if you want: jt at rubicon project dot com.
Thanks for testing out our private beta!
JT
JT:
We did talk to someone at Rubicon. What you guys said was to use filtering to sort through ads for our site. And we thought that is what Rubicon is going to do. With all due respect, even Google with millions (?billions) of pages, is able to deliver contextual ads without publishers doing much of the filtering. Our job is to publish, yours is to deliver the ads. In our medical blog’s case, you guys did not deliver. Good luck! We’ll wait and we’ll see…
DrO– thanks for your reply.
With our technology, Google still serves ads the same ways they normally do (they are a contextual network). That is the same as the rest of the ad networks– they are still using their same targeting technology (most of them are not contextual, but can often be higher paying). Our system figures out which ad networks do best for particular impressions.
JT:
“Our system figures out which ad networks do best for particular impressions.”
I fully realize how your service works. What I am saying is that in pursuit of higher CPMs (?) you lost track of what is being delivered.
Our current TribalFusion (just one network) delivers very reasonable ads that we are OK with. With you guys, we’ve got God-only-knows what networks delivering ads for emoticons, rap songs, and other garbage. Instead of telling customers what they need to do (i.e. filtering) you should work on the system that delivers quality content. Garbage might be good for teenage blogs, but for us (and, likely, for many others) it was not acceptable.
Good luck with improving your service!
To JT’s credit though, even with Google you have to do some filtering from time to time. While Adsense does a good job at delivering relevant ads, it isn’t the gold standard that Rubicon should live up to.
That being said, I think DrO is saying that ad networks might choose to send their extra inventory to Rubicon because the ads might have been rejected elsewhere (hence the complaints about hokey ads). And Kevin is saying that Adsense is likely the lesser of many evils, but you can get dinged easily for click fraud (among other things).
hmmm… An exchange for rejected publisher websites who want to run their inventory across networks with rejected ads. Sounds like a business opportunity!
I have one question, if your are newcomer in the business and you want increase revenue from ads. what you recommend to use example Rubicon, pubmatic, Direct Media exchange.. etc.. let me know