Let’s face it: There’s lots of ways to make money from your site. But with so many choices, it’s daunting.

RMX Direct starts to make that a simpler task.

To assist you even further, we’ll be adding ‘Quick Tip’ how-to videos to our application. Luke Walsh, our head analyst, will be among the guests we interview.

We’ll be covering lots of techniques to help you optimize your account. And if you have particular questions you want answered, leave us a comment or email us at direct@rightmedia.com.

In an article yesterday on ClickZ, Kate Kaye reports on Ben Edelman’s latest finds in his crusade against spyware and the companies perpetuating it. On his blog, Edelman describes how Cingular and Travelocity ads ended up serving through spyware in mid-February, and he includes data on how the ads passed through the Right Media Exchange. Kaye states: “As presented through packet log data, Edelman implicates Right Media as having distributed spyware-originated traffic to advertisers in four of the six examples provided.”

When we talked about this before, we concentrated on clarifying our role in the market — providing an open environment for buyers and sellers to trade more directly and with greater visibility — and how that will help cut down a lot of the tangle that comes with network inter-trading. That said, we’ve also talked a lot about the systems we’ve put in place, into which we’ve poured a tremendous amount of resources, to proactively combat problems like those Edelman describes. Our Creative Tester system, for example, puts ads in the Right Media Exchange through a multi-step scrutiny to catch any creatives with unsavory characteristics. We described in detail how that system and our auditors’ diligence stopped a new technique that spawns pop-ups out of banners.

We were similarly aggressive in handling the Fullcontext issue. Shortly after being notified of the situation, we determined that the spyware agent was using certain techniques, such as keeping publisher tags in files hidden behind multiple IP addresses on foreign networks, to mask its malicious intent. Within 24 hours of the complaint, we were in direct contact with the foreign hosting firm, and 48 hours after that, the hosting company terminated its contract with the spyware agent. We also severed ties with several publishers deemed associated with the offense described later in Ben’s article.

The systems for catching these kinds of things, however, are far from perfect. Combating the bad guys out there is an ongoing process — clever people are always going to think of new ways to sneak around the security guard. This affects every one of us in this industry — we have to keep learning with every new incident, and work together to make the broad marketplace safer. We at Right Media are spending a lot of time and energy trying to be as proactive and thorough as possible. But there’s more that we can do. Check back in with us on this blog to see how we’re progressing in the fight.

This Exchange thing appears to be catching on. People keep asking to speak with us about what Right Media and the Exchange are all about, the impact it’s having on the industry, and where it’s going. Accordingly, we hosted an “analyst day” last Thursday to get everyone on the same page in one shot. It was a great day, with topical panels (featuring RMX publishers, advertisers, networks, and technology providers), presentations, and a lot of lively Q&A between the 40 some odd analysts, Exchange participants and Right Media execs alike. BusinessWeek’s Catherine Holahan covered the event and lends some insight into what we’re trying to do over here in an article today on BusinessWeek.com.

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.

Oy! Has it been a month already?! I get such nachas from putting these words down.

Yes, it’s another episode of Forum Talk…where we focus on what people are saying about RMX Direct. This week, we’ll be shifting a bit towards another medium we use here besides the RMX Direct forums. It’s so 1990’s and so Web 1.0, but it’s great: email.

Our support staff is always receiving emails from users about this or that: feature requests, questions, etc. But we’re also proactive — why not email someone with an answer before they’ve got a question? We’re not mind readers, but we’re always looking at accounts and analyzing them…asking ourselves, “What can they change to earn more from their account?” (more…)