alarm:clock

Advertising - Friday, August 17, 2007

Pubmatic Launches Rockin' New Ad Network Bake-off Tool

UPDATE: We chatted with the GM of Pubmatic today Rajeev Goel, who explained that his company Komli raised funding from DJF a year ago. It is an Indian ad network and got up and going rapidly. Pubmatic was launched within Komli at launch but because it is a very complex technical project they worked on it in stealth mode for a year.

We are more excited about Pubmatic than we have been about any online ad tool that we can remember. The problem the company addresses is this:

+ Publishers don't have the time or wherewithal to compare performance from different ad networks.
+ So every ad publisher is leaving money on the table and knows it.
+ Pubmatic will let you run ads from different ad networks along with different color schemes and auto optimize so that you no longer get shortchanged.
+ This should weed out the bad networks from the good and force networks that are greedy with their rev shares to give more or lose publishers.

We saw traces of Pubmatic back in April when we came across a US/Indian ad network called Komli which was funded by DFJ. Now San Francisco-based Pubmatic has launched in limited alpha (it says it will close the doors after the first 100 publishers sign up.) The same founder and funders are behind both Komli and Pubmatic so we will seek clarification.

We like how Pubmatic describes its mission: "For publishers PubMatic helps you auction your ad inventory to the major networks you work with already, optimize your contextual creative and ad formats to optimize your click-thru rates, and to help make it easier to answer questions (that you think would be basic) such as “How much money did I make yesterday?”

The company will be compared to ad exchange like Right Media and ADecn but we like the fact that it seems to be far more simple and rather than focus on remnant inventory, it goes for the jugular with what is primary CPC revenue.

Pubmatic says that it will be helpful to ad networks and wants to work with them and makes the argument that this tool will make it more cost effective for ad networks to reach publishers. But we think ad networks will fear for their lives.

The company is led by Amar Goel, Founder and CEO, who led the sales and service team at Microsoft/MSN for the financial services and retail verticals. He also ran Chipshot.com, a top golf eCommece site. GM Rajeev Goel was Senior Director, Product Marketing at SAP.

Pubmatic's investors are Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Helion Ventures or as Pubmatic's CEO puts it: "(those evil venture capitalists!, seriously, these guys are great and have been invaluable. "

View - site
View - PaidContent post