We’ve selected publisher Ransu Salovaara as our new Featured Publisher.

Ransu Salovaara is located in Scandinavia: Finland to be exact. As his interest is in extreme sports, he also has an extremely unique business model: he creates custom ad campaigns for sports-related web sites through his ad network SportsSyndicator.com .

Ransu is this month’s Featured Publisher.

Vince Panero (VP): How did you get interested in web publishing originally? What were those early days like for you?

Ransu Salovaara: I started an extreme sports portal called ROCsport.com in Scandinavia (Finland and Sweden) back in 1999. Back then, and actually until recently, it was super hard to get advertisers online as, traditionally, print had been the thing for niche sports advertising.

VP: Can you tell us about your website? How would you describe your focus/business model? And are there any particular issues exclusive to your site that you had to overcome to make the advertising model work?

Ransu Salovaara: I’ve been working with sports media for years, but last summer I finally realized that there is a need for a company that creates nice sports content and community sites. My company works to better businesses by helping them with their online advertising and marketing needs.

SportSyndicator.com went live at the end of October, and in the first three months we got 100 sites to join our network.

VP: Why did you start using RMX Direct as your ad management platform of choice?

Ransu Salovaara: About a month after our start, I realized that our growth was too fast to handle through our own sales team—that’s how I started to work actively with networks.

After hooking up with my first five networks, I started to envision a platform that could be used to manage all these ad flows.

With a bit of luck, I found RMX Direct. I signed up right away.

VP: What statistical changes have you seen since you started using it? For example, have your eCPM and revenue increased?

Ransu Salovaara: We have a total of 20 ad networks now on the SportSyndicator Optimized flow. Since the start, eCPM has grown 50% and I have a goal to get eCPM three times higher by the end of this year. Getting CPM up takes quite a lot of effort. We need to be extremely smart with our frequency caps and geo targeting as those have huge effects on results with those networks that we’ve added manually to RMX Direct.

VP: What do you like most about RMX Direct? Are there helpful parts of it that other ad management interfaces simply don’t offer? And how does it address the specific needs of your website’s unique niche?

Ransu Salovaara: RMX Direct has the best user interface that I have seen in the ad serving business. It has easy to follow statistics, I can email scheduled reports to my partner sites, and I especially like how simple it is to add new campaigns and ad flows with the Manage tab. By doing some manual work and watching my statistics, I have managed to add all my CPA affiliate programs to RMX Direct as well…and now they are there bidding together with CPMs and CPC’s.

VP: Do you have any tips or tricks that you think others using the exchange might find useful?

Ransu Salovaara: I haven’t used the community aspect of RMX Direct as much as I could have. I do see that, in that selective group, there is definitely wisdom in that crowd; it includes many seasoned online publishers with a knowledge of working with many ad networks. When I have more time, I will post and learn from those guys.

VP: Do you have any final thoughts on this “exchange concept” (network transparency and competition, the utility of having just one login, etc.)?

Ransu Salovaara: Many people, especially with a print publishing background, think that it is better to wait for good CPM deals. They don’t sell sites’ inventory at low CPMs as that “damages price levels for good”. I think that is old fashion. And now, in an era of automated bidding, the worst thing that you can do is throw away unsold inventory. Unsold inventory equals lost money. Every penny counts and you cannot sell today’s impressions ever again. So roll full time ads on whatever price you can get and once your inventory is close to full, the price should go up.

Also, if you are worried about bad ads (dating, lottery, etc.) damaging your site’s image, that is definitely a good concern. Therefore, we over ban with Media Guard rather than under ban. On Sportsyndicator.com, we have the Media Guard filtering set to accept only 42% of ads.

VP: Thanks, Ransu, for being a member of RMX Direct.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 5th, 2007 at 1:28 pm and is filed under Publishers, 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.