It’s time to get a bit more specific about the product known as RMX Direct that we’re building here at Right Media. First, before I get into what the application specifically is, let’s do an overview of the state of the ad network and web publisher relationship. Most web publishers today work with multiple ad networks. This occurs for a number of reasons, but primarily because single networks can’t monetize all of a publisher’s impressions, networks specialize in different areas, and because publishers like to make sure they are making the most money possible and they don’t trust that one network alone will do that for them.

So, what ends up happening is publishers either create a daisy chain of networks that pass impressions they don’t want from one network to the other, or they choose to allocate a percentage of their inventory to each network based on performance.

Neither one of those solutions is truly ideal. Not to mention the other hassles that crop up like having to manage ad tags from each network, having to log in to each network to check stats, and getting paid at different times by each network. It’s a hassle.

Right Media has made a lot of progress in the last year creating a gigantic auction-based advertising marketplace called Yield Manager. Yield Manager currently has around 50 ad networks as part of this marketplace, hundreds of advertisers, and thousands of publishers. Up until this point though, publishers on Yield Manager were “owned” by a particular network, and all ads being served to them had to come through the network that “owned” them, even if it was another network’s advertiser that won that auction. While these publishers are still getting the benefit of having their inventory auctioned up to many networks and advertisers on Yield Manager, they still have had to work with multiple networks, manage multiple tags, and get paid from each network individually.
An email that I’d receive about once a week would go something like this:

“Hi, I am currently working with 5 networks that use Yield Manager to serve their ads. Is there a way I can combine this all into one thing?”

The answer has actually been “Yes, if you use your enterprise level publisher solution which does full ad serving and is overkill for most small to medium sized publishers, and it has a fee. But in your case, no there isn’t a way.”

Now, RMXD is going to solve this problem. We’ll get to how in the next post.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 1st, 2006 at 7:30 am and is filed under Direct Media Exchange. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.