Rubicon Project - Optimized Advertising For Everyone

Last Thursday I was able to get a sneak peak at a up and coming Advertising solution which is doing a semi-private beta launch today. Its called the Rubicon Project and out of a few self optimizing advertising solutions I have heard of Rubicon is by far the most robust and feature rich. So what does Rubicon do? - short explanation: The Rubicon Project ensures your website is making as much money as possible by optimizing it for not only the highest paying advertising company but also for demographic/geographical data. Well that is the short definition anyway and what it does by default. You can also override all the defaults and give preference to various networks or demographics if your main goal is not just to make money (i dunno why =P ). So it sounds good right? Makes sense? Let me tell you this.... I have talked to about 3 companies in the last couple months who are talking about doing the same thing... to a extent but 1) none of them have any clue how they are going to setup the relationships with companies and 2) have no clue about reporting or anything else... Well I was pretty stunned when I actually got to play with it and saw exactly how it done it is. Check out all these Advertising networks I selected from there huge list. You might recognize a few contextual advertisers like Google Adsense and Yahoo Publisher Network. Or some of the top CPC networks like Chitika... or Affiliate networks like Commission Junction and CPA Empire... Or CPM like Tribal Fusion. Yea... they have a TON of networks that are already integrated. Check this screen shot (click any image in this post for the full sized image) Also as you can see there is a rating about the networks to help you select. I really loved the functionality and the ease of adjusting preference between networks: The Demographic and Geographic targeting is something that most publishers I think are going to love. So many people just run Adsense and call it a day... they dont even know about the hispanic and other geographic advertising networks out there which can be targeted based on the visitors ip address. Also with Rubicon you can override these default geotargeting functions and specify what you want to be shown to who you want.... For instance if you had a search engine marketing website and you wanted to show all us visitors Yahoo/Verizon affiliate offers form CJ but if people came from the UK you wanted to show them the UK Yahoo search marketing offer you could easily do that with Rubicon. The Rubicon Project simplifies all aspects of advertising including setting up the accounts with all these networks for you. Of course you can still use your own account if you prefer. Rubicon will also collect all the money owed to you from all the networks and issue you 1 consolidated payment OR you can choose to keep getting checks from each one on your own if you choose. Now I am guessing your asking yourself the same/first question I posed to the Rubicon people. How are you guys going to make money? They told me at this time there was no revenue model in place. Which I then kind of assumed that they are getting a kickback from all the advertising networks referring people (via the all in 1 sign up). Anyway like I said self optimizing ads is something I have heard from a few companies but it looks like Rubicon is going to be the first real player with a full blown solution for people. So... what questions do you have about the Rubicon project? Ask them in the comments and I will ask them to Frank Addante, Founder & CEO, on my radio show Tuesday!