JT’s blog

fast ads

We’ve received a number of questions about ad serving lately so thought it would be helpful if we addressed the topic in our forum. Serving ads quickly is a top priority at the Rubicon Project and a subject we take very seriously. We recognize this is an important issue to publishers and their users, especially publishers that rely solely on ad networks as a primary source of income.

First, a little background:

Really, really big publishers rely on us to serve their ads quickly. From sites owned by Fortune 500 companies to publishers that generate millions of dollars a year in ad sales, the Rubicon Project delivers. Whether you have 100 or 100 million impressions a day, our technology will quickly serve up an optimized ad network (we’ve already done so more than 8 billion times!). Our ad serving technology was specifically built to optimize ad networks using the latest innovations and best practices—this is no duct tape system that’s been patched together for years and years. It’s custom built from scratch for your optimal benefit.

Our team has built huge systems before that rely on delivering super fast serving speeds: L90/admonitor, which sold to Doubleclick; MySpace; Ticketmaster and eToys. Each of those businesses is completely reliant on delivering fast serving speeds for customers (think of the uproar if 13 year olds in Kansas City couldn’t get their Hanah Montana tickets at 10 am on Saturday morning because the Ticketmaster site was slow!) As I like to say, this isn’t our first rodeo. Needless to say, our collective past experience has heavily influenced and direct the development of our massive, yet incredibly nimble, infrastructure.

Here’s how we handle ad serving speed:

Many publishers come to us with 3-4 ad networks, but even managing that number can be a pain, especially when it comes to ad serving speed. To make things easier (and more lucrative!), we optimize and serve across more than 60 ad networks, a number that’s growing every day, for our publishers. Occasionally, even with the fast serving speeds on our end, an ad network will have a hiccup serving ads, sometimes taking up to 15 seconds to appear. If this happens, we’ve designed our system so that publishers are able to immediately pause the slow ad network through the Rubicon Project UI until the ad network is able to fix the issue. No more yanking down tags! Management just became easier for publishers by reducing the possibility that an ad network “loses” access to their quality inventory from inactive tags.

To ensure that the we’re consistently serving ads at lightning fast speed we incorporate a number of measurement benchmarks, including our own internal testing process to ensure we’re doing everything on our end to not add any latency to the serving process; and incorporating industry standard 3rd party monitoring tools to keep an eye on things as well. We are committed to improving, and contributing to any slowness, in ad speed and delivery.

We also have a few other tricks we’re cooking up in the Rubicon Project labs specifically targeted at helping our publishers monitor and manage ad network’s ad serving speed. I will definitely keep you posted on our progress there so stay tuned.

Thanks and happy (super fast) monetizing!