Since early 2006, we’ve been monitoring and testing every creative trafficked into the exchange. Our automated Creative Tester (CT) identifies malicious activity, such as viruses, ActiveX downloads and other high risk activities, on creative load. In January, we started emailing advertisers ‘CT Violation Report’ emails informing them of the infractions for each creative.

In efforts to make the Exchange a safer place in 2007, we’re rolling out Phase 1 of Media Guard. Publishers and networks can now ban any unwanted tags on both the universal targeting and line item levels. We’re rolling this out with ActiveX, viruses, and program installs banned for all publishers and networks on the universal targeting level. This is going into the beta release today and will be available in prod in 2 weeks.

Any creative tagged with a CT violation will remain tagged for 7 days. This safeguards publishers while allowing advertisers to work with their partners to clean up the creatives. If the creative continues to exhibit malicious behavior, the 7 days will reset with each infraction.

As most of you know, we have also been human auditing creatives. Currently, all image/Flash files and Atlas redirects are being audited. We recently began to audit third party tags with a single creative behind it. Once we work through this backlog, we will add third party tags that rotate multiple creatives of a single offer type. The auditing team is working hard to make this happen as quickly and accurately as possible. Once that’s done, we’ll release Media Guard fully into production. Stay tuned for more updates.

After a successful beta period, Right Media is proud to announce the public launch of RMX Direct for Publishers. RMX Direct is a simple solution for managing advertising networks that allows publishers to make more money from their websites.

RMX Direct allows publishers to create a competition for their ad inventory by letting them forge direct relationships with nine ad networks that are participants in the Right Media Exchange. These networks see the characteristics of each ad impression such as the user’s geography, frequency of ads they’ve viewed, and more. They bid in real-time what they’re willing to pay for each impression based on those characteristics. Additionally, publishers can add any ad network they already work with to the competition, guaranteeing that RMX Direct will only earn them more money than they are making today.

Instead of talking all day about what we think about RMX Direct and what it can do for publishers, which we’ve done plenty of on our blog in the past, we thought we’d let the publishers and bloggers who have taken part in our beta period speak for themselves.

What Publishes Are Saying

“We’ve doubled our effective CPM and revenue within a month. It was drastic. We also manage Casale Media, Google Adsense, Tribal Fusion, ValueClick, and Advertising.com through this interface. It’s WAY less work and helping us make much more money.”
Steve Jenkins, President, CheatCodes.com

“Having a system that can find the best fit for a given ad impression is great for us. We’ve noticed great results in our eCPM. Now, we have far less wasted inventory as it all gets allocated to its best fit.”
Mehul Patel, President, Swirve.com

“Since coming to RMX everything has changed for us in amazingly positive ways. Not only has our eCPM increased considerably, but we have also been allowed now to focus more on the site itself again since we are
running all of our networks from one location. It is simply a smart choice for both big and small sites.”
Valerie Burgess, ProfileJewels.net

“This system is great. Our revenue shot up by 40% last month after using it. We have so much unused inventory to fill and we’ve sent it all to you guys. Thanks.”
Jamie Davis, Star Media Group

“For me it’s more about the management interfaces than the revenue. I’ll take the extra money, but look at all the work I don’t have to do! Nine networks, one reporting system, one creative filter, one set of ad code. It’s a no-brainer really. Our eCPM is up. Our revenue is up. I’d have to guess the last 30% comes from the automated bidding. I’m about to close
down our accounts at 2 external networks now because they almost never win a bid!”
Bruce Davey, Fastmail.FM

What Bloggers Are Saying

“It’s plenty robust enough to serve any small publisher’s needs, and some of its clever capabilities may prove useful to large publishers as well. You get a simple self-serve ad management system where you can drop in new creative including ad code from your ad networks like YPN or AdSense or even Feedburner. I’ve also loaded in a house ad. It took only
a couple of minutes to setup each ad. Then you get your Right Media ad code to post into your web page templates. Done.”
Matt McAlister, Sr. Product Manager, Yahoo!

“Looks like an interesting and innovative system that could work well for publishers seeking to leverage alternative ad networks.”
Marshall Kirkpatrick, TechCrunch

“RMX Direct uses an accessible web based application that makes it as easy as possible for bloggers and other niche content providers to find the best possible advertising for their site, at the best price.”
Robin Good, Master New Media

“I love it when companies take it to a new level and really bring real tangible benefits, in this case more cash for the publisher.”
Josh Morgan, Intense Web Media

Beyond comments from others, we also have some numbers to summarize the RMX Direct beta period through December 31st:

- Over 11 billion ad impressions served
- 3.75 billion ad impressions served in the month of December alone
- Over 16 million clicks on ads
- Over 300,000 conversions
- Over $1.4 million in publisher revenue run through RMX Direct
- 750 publisher accounts
- 350 discussions started in the community forums

RMX Direct is now ready to open the doors to the public, and we hope to help publishers everywhere make the most money possible from their websites. Sign up now!

Additional Resources

• RMX Direct Website
• Frequenty Asked Questions

Other Stories

• Right Media Launches RMX Direct - DMNews
• RMX Direct Ad Exchange Launches - IMediaConnection
• Maximize Your Ad Inventory Earnings with RMX Direct - Web Publishing Blog
• RMX Direct Out of Beta - 360TechBlog
• RMX Direct Out of Beta - Digg
• RMX Direct launches, lets publishers optimize inventory - Yardley.ca
• RMX Direct Gets Best Ad Revenue For Small Publishers - AdRants
• RightMedia Launches RMX Direct for Publishers - Cost Per News
• Right Media Spurs Network Sparring Over Small Site Inventory - ClickZ
• RMX Direct to Make Publishers $$$ - MikeMcNeeley.com
• Right Media Launches RMX Direct - OffTheIsland
• It’s All About the Launch - The Green V
• RMX Direct Open To Public - Learning Horses
• RMX Direct Launches - WebMetricsGuru
• Official Press Release - Right Media

As the person responsible at Right Media for ensuring that active-x/viruses don’t hit the Right Media exchange I thought it’d be appropriate to respond to Sandi Hardmeier’s blogpost that claims Right Media is responsible for Myspace running ads that attempt to install Spyware. You can find the post here: http://msmvps.com/blogs/spywaresucks/archive/2007/01/27/523217.aspx

First — simply because delb.myspace.com (myspace’s adserver) sometimes redirects to ad.yieldmanager.com (our adserver) doesn’t mean that this came from us. As you may have noticed, you will also see ads from many different ad networks. I’m not trying to point blame elsewhere, but it’s impossible to say who caused this without actual referring urls from the end users. This is an industry-wide problem, and please see the links below for more info on both how clever these spyware providers can be and what’s being done about it.

Second — We have been working extremely hard on stopping this behavior from ever occuring on the Right Media Exchange. We have an automated auditing tool that checks our ads 24/7 for behavior such as this. Over the past 3 months we have shut down hundreds of ads that try to do active-x installs and even a couple parties that attempted to spread viruses using ad networks. Please check out the following articles from our blog for more info:

http://blog.rightmedia.com/2007/01/27/banner-ops-and-errorsafe/
http://blog.rightmedia.com/2006/08/02/Two-Viruses-Ten-Creatives-and-an-Automated-Creative-Tester/
http://blog.rightmedia.com/2006/08/30/how-media-guard-works/

Please email me at mnolet@rightmedia.com if you have any additional questions.

-Mike

What are banner pops and why are they a problem?

Banner pops are regular display banners that display a popup when loaded under certain circumstances. Since most websites that allow popups will simply place a popup tag on their site banner-pops are actively made to circumvent a web site’s policies. The economics of this are obvious. Popup payment rates tend to be significantly higher than 468×60 banners so if the advertiser can create his own popup inventory he stands to make a lot of money.

Over the past couple months, the Right Media Exchange has had problems with unexpected pops advertising ‘Errorsafe’ appearing out of 468×60 and 728×90 banners. ErrorSafe is a company that commonly buys web page pop inventory to display ads for their registry cleaning software. Instead of buying the standard web page pop inventory they realized it would be more economical to create their own by booking deals for 468×60 inventory and serving their ‘banner pop’ creatives. To make matters worse, the popups that are shown often try to initiate active-x program installs.

No network would actively traffic a 468×60 creative that shows a popup. To circumvent creative approval policies at ad networks, the advertisers mask the creatives so that they only show popups in certain countries at certain times of the day. Generally the times and countries are set to avoid the network. So for a New York based ad-network, pops probably wouldn’t appear in the US from 7am to 9pm.

Why does this keep happening if we know it’s a problem?

ErrorSafe started by doing Active-X at night on their web page buys. Those got expensive quickly and also started to get shutdown, so they started to buy 468×60 inventory and launch pops at night. Networks started to catch on to the new scam rather quickly and most took one of two actions: they either refused to sell to ErrorSafe altogether, or they insisted that ErrorSafe provide them with actual swf/gif files that the network could host themselves. Let‘s look at the latest example of the ErrorSafe scam to see how they have gotten around of both of these problems.

Take a look at the following ad:
http://content.yieldmanager.com/13312/94749/27e558c94df509ebe888fdc0060640e8.swf

This is an ad for a website uk.matchservice.com. Notice first that this is a very professional but completely fake website. Click around a bit, try to signup, and you’ll realize very quickly that there is no UK dating site here. Now, even though the whois info for the domain seems legit, the last person that called the contact number got a plumbing service in London.

Now if you open up an HTTP sniffer while loading that ad (I like the Tamper Data plugin for Firefox) you will notice that it requests two files:

http://uk.matchservice.com/crossdomain.xml
http://uk.matchservice.com/reg_swf.php?campaign=tiger&unique=

If you take a peek at the second URL you will receive a basic text document with one of two things in it: ‘popup:0′ or ‘popup:1′. Most likely, if you are in the US you will get a value of ‘0′ and if you are international you will get ‘1′. Woohoo! We’ve figured it out… right?? Some external web page checks the user‘s geography based on ip. Ok, so how come our automated testing still wasn’t catching these guys? We decided to decompile the flash to look for some details and try to figure out why. The first thing we noticed in there was the following line of code:

constants ‘my_date’, ‘getTime’, ’setTime’, ‘my_so’, ‘data’, ‘expires’, ’swfush’, ‘_root’, ’strong’, ‘this’, ‘getNextHighestDepth’, ‘target_mc’, ‘createEmptyMovieClip’, ‘unique’, ‘GET’, ’sscript’, ‘loadVariables’, ‘param_interval’, ‘checkParamsLoaded’, ’setInterval’, ‘popup’, ‘1′, ‘clearInterval’, ‘tzjscript’, ‘_self’, ‘0′, ’strongPP’, ‘http://www.errorsafe.com/pages/scanner/index.php?aid=tiger&lid=swf7&ax=1&ex=1&ed=2′,

So we see a url for errorsafe in there, but we still weren’t catching these guys in our automated tester. Digging more into the code we saw:

tz=-dt.getTimezoneOffset()/60;p=(n.userAgent.indexOf(\’SV1\’)!=-1)||(a&&(a.indexOf(\’SP2\’)!=-1));i=(d.all&&encodeURI()&&!w.Event);if(!(tz>=’, ‘&&tz\’;};(i&&p)?o.launchURL(u):w.open(u);};void 0;’, ‘jscript’, ‘\’;p=(n.userAgent.indexOf(\’SV1\’)!=-1)||(a&&(a.indexOf(\’SP2\’)!=-1));i=(d.all&&encodeURI()&&!w.Event);if(p&&!d.getElementById(\’o\’)){d.body.innerHTML+=\’\';};(i&&p)?o.launchURL(u):w.open(u);

What does all this mean? Well:
- The creative loads up two external files, one which returns a popup:0/1 value depending on the geo loaded from the users IP address.
- It then checks the user’s timezone and browser language to make sure the user is not in the United States.
- Based on results from #1 & #2, it launches a popup for ErrorSafe.com.

Ok, what are we doing about this?

- Our automated tester is now set to catch all of the behavior that I’ve described above and we are actively tracking down new techniques to initiate pops from banners.
- We are placing permanent exchange wide bans on advertisers that facilitate this scam.
- We are starting to use statistical pattern analysis to preempt and detect bad creatives before they can go live.

We are working around the clock to the ensure the safety of the exchange. I encourage you to email me at mnolet@rightmedia.com if you have any additional questions or comments about this issue.

Brad, the guy who sits across from me who I and others have written about before wants to let you know that ACH is a better way to be paid on our RMX Direct platform.

Check out some notes from his email to the team this morning:

‘’Bottom line is that ACH is a fantastic payment system…On the network side of things…they click a button in their account and pubs get paid. It’s efficient and effective. Publishers need to take advantage of the opportunity.'’

ACH is one login, you can run historical reports to track which networks have paid you, checks don’t get misnamed, and you get paid on time. This is definitely a faster way to get paid than, say, money order or a check through snail mail. Direct deposit is speed ‘o light fast.

I was curious, so I had to ask more: how about ACH vs. PayPal?

‘’Well, they are both direct deposit and both efficient'’, says Brad in one of our IM’s this morning, ‘’but don’t you then have to transfer funds from your PayPal account to your bank account? ACH is direct. It’s free for US pubs…'’

But there’s another side to this, and I see it everyday: Brad’s dry-erase board. See the red on the board in the back? That’s just the titles of his projects–the details go on for miles.

Brad– along with his whole other trove of projects he’s managing–is always thinking, planning and implementing ways to make it easier for everyone in RMX Direct. Remember: the user is god. Brad’s working hard with others, like Adam P. who spearheaded this out of the Right Media office in New York. He wants you to make use of the fastest way to get your cash. An improved process has finally come.

So, check out more about ACH at the FAQ on ACH here. Sign up for ACH. And you’ll get your money faster. And you’ll make Brad smile.