We’ve signed on some pretty big publishers (and lots of small and mid-sized ones) since ad:tech San Francisco. As a result, we’re we’re serving more ad impressions than ever and we’re very excited about how quickly publishers are adopting our ad optimization services.

We set new records every day last week in terms of number of impressions optimized and served. Yesterday we optimized twice as many ads as we did a week ago. We effectively doubled our traffic and reach in less than a month. I can’t share exact numbers publicly, but our growth rate looks like a hockey stick right now.

This is amazing by any measure and I wanted to thank all of our new publishers for giving us a shot at improving their eCPM’s. Our team has worked around the clock launching new features and making sure our publishers are happy.

While we’re seeing great success in adding new publishers, we’re also adding more and more ad networks, which means better fill rates and monetization for publishers. We added three more ad networks last week and are adding three more in the next two weeks.

Thanks again to everyone and we look forward to telling you more about some of the new capabilities shortly.

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Ad:tech San Francisco was a tremendous event for our team. We had roughly 10 people on site, from business development to marketing to account managers, all focused on connecting in person with many of the people that we talk to over the phone with on a daily basis.

We connected with over 30 publishers and 50 ad networks while at ad:tech, along with numerous technology vendors and potential vendors. The highlight of the event was the cocktail party we hosted at Bong Su, one of San Francisco’s top Asia-themed lounges, on Wednesday night.

A big thank you to everyone that came to our party. We had an awesome time hanging out with some of our most-valued partners and customers, including publishers and ad networks. Our party was packed with leaders from some of the biggest Web sites and Ad Networks in the world, and all had great feedback on our services.

One of the highlights of the night was giving away a MacBook Air as a door prize. There were over 300 business cards stuffed in the fish bowl and I couldn’t have picked a more deserving winner. Max Gideon, who runs ad operations for Technorati, is a big Apple fan and I’m sure he’ll put it to good use.

Rajeev Goel with MacBook Air winner Max Gideon of Technorati

He emailed us to thank us for the prize and said: ”I don’t think it actually hit me until I opened the box and took it [brand new MacBook Air] out. Thank you so much for a great computer, party and overall service.” Thank you Max – we’re looking forward to continuing to work closely with you.
For those of you on the East Coast who we may have missed, we look forward to seeing you at OMMA Publish in New York on June 17th or ad:tech New York in the Fall.

Rajeev Goel, Jeremy Wright (CEO of B5 Media) and Jon Burke

Party Organizer Tabi Ansari and Jag Misra

Click below for the full gallery:

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It’s another big week here at PubMatic, with back-to-back meetings lined up during ad:tech San Francisco. Everyone from our Palo Alto office will be at the conference to meet with existing partners and network like crazy.

On Wednesday we’re hosting a party at Bong Su, a very classy restaurant that’s just down the street from the conference, from 4:30pm to 7:30pm. One lucky guest will win a MacBook Air just for showing up. Space is really limited, so please RSVP to Brittany@justdrivemedia.com if you’re interested in attending.

We’re also introducing the PubMatic MediaKit to help publishers sell ads directly this week. This tool will allow publishers to generate customized MediaKits in less than five minutes and embed widgets on their sites to help promote them. If you’re a current publisher, just log in to your account and click on the MediaKit tab. This is the first revision of PubMatic MediaKit and we’re eager to hear your feedback.

I also wanted to thank everyone that’s shown interest in the PubMatic AdPrice Index. We introduced it just a week ago and we were very excited to see so many bloggers and publishers discussing it online. Techcrunch, Center Networks, Adotas, Click Z, Mashable and many others mentioned the index.

Thanks for stopping by PubMatic and we’ll see you at ad:tech!

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I just got back into the office after a quick trip to Europe to meet with some partners and scout out some quality European ad networks to partner with. Most of our publishers see 10% to 20% of their visitors coming from Europe. For publishers who monetize their European inventory with the right Europe-based ad networks, we can double the publishers’ monetization of European traffic, leading to increased overall revenue of 20% to 40%.

My first stop was ad:tech Paris, which is one of the newer venues of the roving ad:tech circuit. The event was on the small side, but I did get to meet with a few ad networks that specifically target French web sites.

After Paris it was on to London. I met with several of the larger ad networks and a couple of upstarts. The UK online advertising market is much different than it is here in the U.S., with ad agencies having a firm grip on ad inventory. There are strict controls and processes around sites being approved to run ads on behalf of agency clients - http://www.iash.org.uk/. Many of the UK ad networks are pan-European, which presents a good opportunity for our publishers.

I consider my short trip to Europe successful, but there was one minor hitch. I had to fly into the troubled British Airways Terminal 5. My original flight to London was canceled, but I was able to catch an earlier flight thanks to my ‘no checked baggage’ policy.

I’m back in Palo Alto now and prepping for ad:tech San Francisco, which is just a few days away. If you’re going to be there we’d like to meet you. Email us if you’d like to set up a meeting, or just stop by our party.

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PubMatic welcomes our first official advisors-Greg Stuart and Munjal Shah. We are very excited to have these two in our court and wanted to introduce you to them.

We met Greg through one of our investors - Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Among other things, Greg was the CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Expect Greg to be remembered as a hero of the Internet advertising boom (sports fans - think NFL commissioner Roger Goodell as an analogy).

The IAB’s mission is to really lift the Internet publishing sector by setting standards to make it easier for advertisers to participate. When we briefed Greg on PubMatic early on he immediately became a booster and asked how he could help. He’s been a solid resource even before this official announcement. You can read more about Greg on his Web site.

Munjal Shah has been a friend of Amar’s (Pubmatic CEO) for years. He’s a world-class startup guy who knows how to build both technology and market attention. He built auction optimization firm Andale and is now the founding CEO of Like.com, a really cool visual search company that makes it easier to shop online..

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I’m proud to announce the PubMatic AdPrice Index (www.adpriceindex.com) today and all of us at PubMatic hope you find it useful. We feel that there is a lack of transparency in pricing for online advertising. The PubMatic AdPrice Index provides benchmark and trending information that’s valuable to publishers, ad networks, and advertisers alike.
We built the index on data we collected from more than 3,000 publishers of all sizes and types. The current index shows trends from the past three months to start and you can look forward to more since we will be updating it monthly.

The initial findings show that ads served by ad networks perform better on Web sites with less than a million page views per month. Publishers with small sites are paid an average of $1.18 eCPM, which is almost triple what the largest sites in our index receive.
It’s important to note that this is an index and provides general trends, and does not attempt to assign eCPMs to particular Web sites. We are well aware that there are sites of all size that have incredibly high eCPMs, but our data shows that targeted traffic is much more valuable to advertisers than very broad traffic, for example the kind found on social networking sites.

One important thing to remember is that the PubMatic AdPrice Index tracks publisher earnings, not gross amounts paid to Ad Networks. Since larger publishers generally have richer revenue sharing deals than small publishers, the gap between what advertisers are actually spending between the two on an impression basis is probably much greater. In addition, the index does not include data about inventory sold by publishers directly to advertisers.

I want to thank the two independent statisticians that prepared the PubMatic AdPrice Index for us - Michele Madansky, PhD, who is a former VP of Global Market Research for Yahoo! and Albert Madansky, PhD, H.G.B. Alexander Professor Emeritus of Business Administration at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

We have big plans for the PubMatic AdPrice Index and will be able to slice and dice the data over time as more publishers join PubMatic.

We welcome your ideas and feedback below, or you can email us at support@pubmatic.com.

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I flew out to New York for IAB’s Ad Networks and Exchanges conference on March 30th. I’ve been to New York dozens of times, but it still feels a world away from Silicon Valley. Management from most of the top ad networks and some of the largest NYC based publishers were in attendance and I spent a lot of time talking with them.

A lot of buzz at the conference was about user-level targeting, whether that’s behavioral, demographic, or something else. Most ad networks love the idea of being able to hunt down users who are likely to buy a particular item or take some other action. On the other hand, a lot of marquee publishers I spoke with see behavioral targeting as a threat because it means the ad networks can identify users’ interests on their web sites, but then retarget them on cheaper web sites. This undercuts niche publishers’ direct sales efforts and some of them see no reason to give away info on their users’ interests.

On the other hand, publishers with broader, untargeted audiences have a lot to gain from behavioral targeting and could see higher CPMs from networks as behavioral targeting is refined.

Ad networks and exchanges talked a lot about their innovative technology, methods and algorithms, but most of the publishers were much more interested in how much money they could earn and not so much interested in all of the technology behind it. After one of the sessions, an executive from a large online media company told me, “All of the ad networks sound the same. At the end of the day I just care about the payout.”

I was thinking about that comment while I was eating dinner at Peter Luger’s Steak House with a couple of friends from college. I didn’t want the waiter to stand over my shoulder and tell me about the ranch, the feed, the breeding, the slaughter and the preparation that went into producing my porterhouse steak. I just wanted to enjoy one of the best steaks I’ve had in in a while without knowing the internals of how it got to my table.

As an aside, I usually mind my own business, but I couldn’t resist listening to the conversation at the next table because Chris Rock was sitting next to me. He obviously wasn’t talking about online advertising, but he was ranting and raving about President Bush. He’s backing Barak Obama in the upcoming election and the whole thing reminded me of Chris Rock’s own bid for president in Head of State. I was pretty impressed with Rock’s personal web site, which is worth a look if you’re a fan .

I’m back in our Palo Alto office for a couple of days, but am flying to Paris on Saturday for ad:tech Paris and then to London on Tuesday for some meetings with ad networks and publishers.

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From Mumbai to New York To Palo Alto, the PubMatic team is jubilant. First we were we asked to speak at the prestigious Dow Jones Venture’s Web Ventures 2008. Then after the votes were tallied we were named one of the top 10 companies.

When you think about all the dozens of impressive Web startups that are launched each week we feel honored to get such recognition. Pats on the backs all around but to be honest we are so busy focused on how to improve our software and service for our publishers that we barley had time to get this post up. Our primary goal today is to lift our revenues and efficiency for our publishers, not win prizes.

Exemplifying this spirit is our architect Anand Das who stayed up today until 3AM to take a publisher call many time zones away only to learn that the call had been postponed.
His response: “No problemo - as long as we make the pub happy and solve his issues.”

Check out the full press release after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

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PubMatic has always represented the best interests of the web publisher, whether large or small, by helping them generate the maximum revenue possible from their web properties. Google’s announcement of a free ad server, Google Ad Manager, is interesting but not entirely new for the market. Free ad servers have been around for some time now, including OpenAds and Expo9 from Exponential Interactive (the company behind Tribal Fusion).

PubMatic provides several unique capabilities that free web publishers from the mundane task of revenue optimization while delivering them more revenue:

• Ad Network Optimization – getting the maximum revenue possible for the publisher, by optimizing across multiple ad networks
• Ad Layout Optimization – finding the optimal ad layout (color scheme, location, size) that increases click-through
  rates and revenues
• One Management Interface – one set of ad tags and one consolidated dashboard for revenue reporting
• Premium Account Services – the best optimization people to help publishers maximize their revenue

For the same publisher, Google is now providing:

• Basic ad serving capability for direct-sold campaigns (campaign management)
• Ability to integrate Google AdSense into the ad server so it’s the default solution for unsold inventory

The capabilities that Google now provides are similar to other adservers in many ways. These capabilities are complementary to PubMatic, as many publishers who use PubMatic do so in conjunction with their ad server. While an ad server is typically used to manage direct-sell campaigns, PubMatic is used to optimize across all of a publisher’s ad network relationships.

What’s unique about Google’s offering is that it integrates an ad network, Google AdSense, with the ad server, Google Ad Manager. The real question is, is this good for publishers?

Google is known for excellence with respect to infrastructure and reliability, as well attentiveness to developing good user interfaces. To the extent that these are true about Google Ad Manager, publishers will benefit.

However, for any publisher to consider using Google Ad Manager, they have to consider that they are letting the wolf into the henhouse – one of the ad networks that competes vigorously for the publisher’s ad inventory, Google AdSense, now controls the
publishers inventory with full visibility into pricing. This is analogous to Wall Street using its research services to hype its
investment banking clients a few years ago. The benefit to the investment bank is clear, but it’s the end user who is often
left in the lurch.

Let’s take an example. Prior to Google Ad Manager, suppose that:

• The publisher sells 30% of their ad inventory through direct-sell campaigns.
• The publisher works with multiple ad networks to sell the remaining 70% of their ad inventory, including Google AdSense which doesn’t disclose the revenue share with the publisher.
• Because no ad network knows what the other ad networks are paying or the value of the direct sell advertising, they each pay the publisher as much as possible in order to win the publisher’s inventory.

If the publisher starts using Google Ad Manager, now:

• Google can see exactly what price the publisher is selling his or her ad inventory for.
• Instead of paying the publisher as much as possible, Google can now simply pay the publisher 1 cent over what others are paying. Google can keep the rest as profit for themselves.
• This is all the more true given that Google AdSense does not work on a fixed payout percentage (e.g., 60% for the publisher, 40% for the ad network), like most ad networks do.

Google Ad Manager is an obvious candidate for the publisher who’s looking for a free, basic ad server in the place of a more full featured one. However, given that there are relatively cheap paid ad servers out there, on the order of a few cents eCPM, it’s probably worth it to use a paid ad server and eliminate the significant conflict of interest that Google Ad Manager represents. The end result may very well be substantially higher revenues for the publisher.

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One of the things I spend a lot of time on is building out the right team for PubMatic.  We’ve been developing our vision for some time now, and since our beta launch in September our key focus is on execution.  Of course, execution can’t be a one or two person show.  It takes the right people, working together, to execute and improve the vision.

That’s why I’m really excited to welcome our latest addition to the PubMatic team, Kevin Weatherman.  Kevin comes to PubMatic after working with Publishers for 2 years at an ad network.  Kevin brings with him an understanding of publisher’s needs and frustrations along with the ability to service publishers small and large. In addition to working at an ad network, Kevin is a publisher and open source developer himself. Kevin owns over 500 domains and has over 50 active web sites, though most of them are small traffic wise, he is very proud of his work. Kevin uses his free time to Develop for Joomla, which  is an open source content management system.

We’re all looking forward to awesome things from Kevin, and if you’re a publisher you might hear from Kevin soon.

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