Using New Service, Movie Fan Site Flixster Significantly Increases Online Advertising Revenue
PALO ALTO, Calif. – May 28, 2008 – PubMatic (www.pubmatic.com), the world’s first service that automates and optimizes ad inventory decision-making for Web publishers, today launched a new service for Web publishers that helps them recapture revenue that would normally be lost to default or blank ads. The new default optimization service allows publishers to monetize 100 percent of their ad inventory at the highest possible price by eliminating wasted default impressions and reselling those impressions to the highest paying ad network. In private testing with several dozen large publishers, PubMatic’s default optimization service boosted publisher revenues by as much as 50 percent.
Background: Web publishers typically work with one or more ad networks to broker ads on their Web sites. However, ad networks set rules for ad campaigns that limit who will see their ads and when they will see them based on geography, time of day, how many times a user has seen an ad, and a variety of other factors. When these limits are reached, a blank or default ad is served, resulting in a lost revenue opportunity for the publisher. Without PubMatic, publishers can only manually attempt to eliminate these ads, which is a very arduous process. As a result, these publishers end up serving public service ads, blank ads, or low paying ads to their audience, leaving an estimated billion dollars in revenue unrealized. During PubMatic’s private test, ad networks defaulted 56 percent of the time on average and as often as 87 percent of the time.
“By manually redirecting default ad inventory to a static string of ad networks, or leaving it unsold altogether, publishers leave what we estimate to be more than a billion dollars on the table each year,” said Rajeev Goel, co-founder and general manager of PubMatic. “It’s hard to imagine any company in any industry simply allowing 20 to 30 percent of its inventory to go to waste.”
PubMatic’s default optimization service automates the reselling process, allowing publishers to instantly redirect unsold ad inventory back to PubMatic, which fills that inventory with the highest paying ad impression every time. PubMatic’s new service is an automated solution for the billion-dollar loss that plagues the industry.
PubMatic customer Flixster, an online community for movie fans, realized significant incremental revenue by deploying the default optimization service. At a time when social networking sites are showing declining eCPMs, Flixster was able to find significant revenue from its existing ad inventory, reaffirming the importance of having a comprehensive and fully automated default ad management strategy as part of any revenue optimization plan.
“PubMatic’s dynamic default optimization service has enabled Flixster to access detailed reporting and tracking of the performance of its remnant inventory,” said Steve Polsky, president and COO of Flixster. “By using PubMatic’s default optimization service Flixster has been able to optimize across all of its ad providers and significantly increase its eCPMs.”
About PubMatic
PubMatic is the world’s first service that increases Web publishers’ revenue by automating and optimizing ad serving decisions. PubMatic significantly increases ad sales revenue for more than 3,500 publishers by optimizing ad serving decisions across hundreds of ad networks and by using sophisticated algorithms to optimize the layout of text and display ads. PubMatic is a service of advertising company Komli and is venture backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Nexus India Capital, and Helion Ventures. Find out more at www.pubmatic.com.
