For some time now, ‘Daisy-chaining’ has been considered a common way to monetize the inventory on your site. This is when you would set-up a chain of networks where the top network takes all of your inventory, serves what it can or wants to serve, then defaults to the next network in your chain–where the process repeats. When you daisy-chain, you have to set a default network within each network of your chain to catch all default impressions.

As a publisher, it was your responsibility to find the right mix of networks that would fill as much of your inventory as possible, at the highest rates. If your chain of networks was not setup right, inventory went unsold and rates were less than optimal. What’s worse, when a ‘defaulting’ of ads happened, there was no guarantee that all those impressions would get transferred onto the next default network: technology differences and constraints can make them vanish.

Furthermore, you can only do so much work to hook-up with different networks to daisy chain–which is also a ton of ad tag management as well. And some non-RMX networks deny your application or have ‘monthly uniques’ requirements. Or the ones that you did choose to work with didn’t deliver like you had hoped they would. With non-rmx networks, they pick and choose what they want–and the rest of your inventory just keeps falling, and falling…further down the daisy chain. You wind up with your inventory being devalued or unfilled.

They aren’t exactly at your service, are they? What’s worse, you are forced to give up control.

My point? The philosophy of daisy-chaining is inherently flawed! Why? Because only one network at a time has the opportunity to serve an ad– the key there is that they might not be the network who will pay the most for it. Thus, the only true way to value your inventory is to have all your networks bidding at the same time.

Competition can’t exist in a daisy-chain.

Well, as you know, everything gets bid on when you’re in RMX Direct, so the default stops here. And even traffic from your 3rd party deals can enter the bidding. Your inventory is valued better and it’s all appreciated: someone, somewhere will bid for it. And since the highest bid serves your ad, doesn’t this make daisy chaining obsolete?

You bet it does.

You get to focus on control… through features like our frequency-capping tool (to control networks’ access to high quality impressions) or a new feature known as ‘passback’… which we will talk more about once we release it.

For now, thanks for helping us break your ‘chains’ of the past.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 9th, 2006 at 6:36 pm 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.