JT’s blog

I’ve talked to a lot of publishers…

…and there have been some reoccurring themes to most of my phone calls. I thought I would try to summarize much of what I have heard and try to generate a larger discussion around them.

1. Publishers are really savvy. Despite a serious lack of technology solutions for them, publishers have rigged together all sorts of homegrown ways to manage (and maybe even optimize) their ad networks. That said, there are also quite a few publishers out there who haven’t had the time to deal with it (too busy running their site/business) and are leaving some serious money on the table.
2. It’s a lot of work managing multiple ad networks (and I have talked to sites that have more than 20!) On average, most of the publishers I talk to have somewhere between 2-5 ad networks and they have often tried 5-10. Publishers have to log in to all of the different interfaces for each network to pull their reports. They then have to calculate their eCPM’s in excel to figure out how often they should show each ad networks. They then need to program their ad server (or do it by hand) to show the right ad networks at the right time. At best, this can be done daily, but most publishers I talk to do this at most of once a week. This doesn’t even include dealing with tags, communication with the ad networks and the end of the month accounting after all the checks come in from different ad networks.
3. Sell through rates for ad networks are often quite low (in the 20-40% range). Depending on the site and the network, they can much higher, but still there is an obvious opportunity for improvement on all sites.
4. Publishers are tired of trying to figure out which ad networks are best for them. With all of the new ad networks that are rolling out, what is a publisher supposed to do? Publishers have to field all the sales calls and emails (or if you are like a lot of the sites—fill out some form and hope that someone will ever get back to you), watch the demo, complete all the paper work, test the tags and get the tags live on your site—this all must be done before you know or not if they are going to make you any decent money (for every ad network you want to try out!).
5. Publishers would rather spend time building out new content, working their site’s seo to drive traffic, improving the site’s ui or spend time with friends/families than try to manage a bunch of ad networks. How many people do you know who started a website just so they could manage a bunch of ad networks?
6. So many publishers have said to me “ad network X ‘gives’ me a $X cpm.” That strikes me as wrong in so many ways.
7. They all are very excited about the Rubicon Project. I think it is for 2 main reasons: we solve their pain points (and I really get the sense they are true pain points) and we will make them more money. I can definitely tell you that the enthusiasm from publishers has excited our team to work harder and faster to bring more publishers in to the beta program and to continue to improve our technology.

So, those are my thoughts. What do you think? Do you have similar thoughts or experiences?