March 3, 2008

YieldBuild Raises $6 Million Series B For Optimizing Ads

Erick Schonfeld

8 comments »

YieldBuild raised a $6 million series B round led by Storm Ventures. Hummer Winblad, which put in the initial $2 million when it launched as HubPages two years ago, also participated. The company is in the process of changing its name to YieldBuild, a service that was launched last October to optimize display ads. As we explained then, YieldBuild:

. . . 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.

YieldBuild competes with the Rubicon Project, which has raised $21 million so far.

CrunchBase Information

YieldBuild

Rubicon Project

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 9:15 am 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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Yieldbuild Review / Casestudy by Elliott C. Back

March 7th, 2008 at 5:51 pm

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Sol

March 3rd, 2008 at 10:20 am

That’s awesome. Congrats to this team. This is a great service.
Hustle Strategy

March 3rd, 2008 at 10:57 am

They seem like great services, are there many large companies (like news outlets) using either of these, it would be interesting to see their case studies.
Alex

March 3rd, 2008 at 10:59 am

Hmmm, I’ve got to be honest their website sucks. What the heck do they do?
It will be interesting to see how this turns out.

Vegas odds has it as a very long shot.
Otis Gospodnetic

March 3rd, 2008 at 11:12 am

So does anyone have any positive comments about this service? Any positive experiences that really yielded increased revenues?
Venter

March 3rd, 2008 at 2:12 pm

We tried them out for a little while. Its an interesting service and I hope they are effective with other sites, but unfortunately they were unable to deliver improved performance out of our ad network. After about a month trial run, we had to remove them from our site. We’ll definitely give them a shot again later on when they’re out of Beta; if they can deliver what they’re promising, it would be well worth it.

Basically, what happens is you hand control of your site’s unoptimized ad space over to them, and they try to get the best performance out of it.

I’m curious if others had varying results. Our revenue was a little bit down when we implemented their solution, but admittedly, our content is somewhat difficult to work with, and we only provided them with one ad-network (Google Adsense). I’m assuming the more ad networks you provide, (I think you can also plug in Overture and some others) the better they will be able to optimize the ad performance.
jackmayhofferr

March 3rd, 2008 at 2:56 pm

Erick

Am I missing something? Their website clearly says they optimize you text ads, not graphical as you stated here. So far they only do google, yahoo & ebay. So it is basically worthless.
Yieldbuild team

March 3rd, 2008 at 10:13 pm

hi all,
As Venter mentioned above, we’re in a beta period now with a great group of beta folks - we’re iterating on the great feedback from our live participants (venter, hope to see you back on again soon) and are seeing great results.
We will be announcing additional ad network and graphical banner support very shortly.