When we announced the 7 finalists of the Amazon Web Services Startup Challenge two weeks ago, we dubbed Yieldex an “online ad optimization engine for Web publishers”. It’s time to take a closer look at what that means, because the company has just been awarded the top prize in the contest, bringing home $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in services credits plus an investment offer from Amazon.com.
Yieldex, not to be confused with similar service YieldBuild, has a solution for managing ad inventory, enabling Web publishers to allocate advertising campaigns more efficiently by forecasting overlapping inventory and predicting how ads are going to deliver. All in all, it seems like a nice solution to hmm … yield more revenue out of premium ad inventory, but I’m left wondering if ensuring optimal ad campaigns isn’t something that’s baked into most ad serving solutions already, or at least should be? I mean, it’s one of the core reasons for using an ad serving system in the first place, right?
Amazon.com annually rewards the most innovative US startup built on its cloud-computing infrastructure, and they get hundreds of applications every year, so there must be something about Yieldex that made them the winner.
So, congratulations to Yieldex and its founders, which consists of industry veterans from Matchlogic and NetGravity (check out CEO Tom Shields’ blog post on winning the award). The prize comes in addition to a previous, undisclosed seed funding round from Sequel Venture Partners, First Round Capital and Woodside Fund.
We have always maintained at http://www.youtechno.info that innovation is king and here is the perfect example whoever has a smart way of solving a problem will gather influence and make lots of money. http://www.youtechno.info
congrats!
The Rubicon Project (http://rubiconproject.com/) are also in the business of ad optimisation and seem to be doing very well out of it. An overlooked opportunity perhaps?
You would think that the ad servers of the world would have this functionality built into them…but in reality they don’t. It’s a very complex problem with many dimensions to the targeting criteria of an ad.
Current ad serves can’t consistently discern if they should satisfy a web request (say from a Male who is a fishermen) with an ad targeted at only Males for $2 CPM…or one targeted only to fishermen for $4 CPM…or an ad targeted to both Males and fisherman for $8 CPM. This is a very simplified example of overlapping inventory.
Yieldex is defiantly filling an industry need that has long been sought and never conquered. Congrats to them on their win.
Very good… congratulations mate