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Forbes mistake leaves Rubicon Project rumor

Written on
May 6, 2009 
Author
Edward Barrera  |
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Forbes mistake leaves Rubicon Project rumor

contagious1.jpgADOTAS — While the Rubicon Project has been a vocal advocate for ad networks and publishers, it took only a minor gaffe by Forbes to get people to question its intentions.

Forbes wrote a story about how the rise of automated ad platforms aimed to reshape digital media. It also mentioned Rubicon’s onDemand product, which automates the buying of online ad inventory, making it easier for ad networks, publishers’ direct sales teams and audience sales representatives with advertisers’ campaigns. But in the original story, Forbes said that onDemand was for advertisers. Despite a correction, Rubicon has received questions about it.

“Now it’s sort of spiraled where people are thinking that we are going outside of the resellers market, and directly to the advertisers, and we’re not,” said Frand Addante, founder and CEO of Rubicon. “We have gotten a lot of feedback about this. People have been worried that we’re going to do that, because we have so much mass now, and so much inventory is running through our platform and because we reach so many users. But we can’t.”

Addante said that would put the company in channel conflict with every single ad network, every single exchange, and with the publishers.

“We’re just trying to be the Visa or the NASDAQ in the middle of this. They supply the infrastructure for the buyers and sellers. We’re doing the same thing, as soon as we go outside and compete with our channels, we would be done,” he said.

The company plans to send out a note to its clients about the hubbub. Here’s a link to Addante explaining onDemand.

 – Express your opinion, comment below.





Reader Comments.

Of course Frank Addante is absolutely correct and telling the truth. This just shows the ignorance of the Forbes writer and their lack of properly researching the story.
Anyone wanting to find out more about how The Rubicom Project can help them – Networks, Publishers, Advertising Agencies and Publishers alike – should contact Raj
Chauhan, VP, and feel free to use my name:
(310) 207-0528. http://www.rubiconproject.com.

Posted by Stuart Falk | 2:00 pm on May 5, 2009.

Stuart,
The writer just made a mistake. It happens. He corrected it. It might have more to do with competitors noting it than anything else.

Posted by Edward Barrera | 3:19 pm on May 5, 2009.

This is a bizarre story. As an editor myself I think it’s odd that Forbes gets slammed and damage control is played out on Adotas.

More importantly, Stuart may call me ignorant too, but why does this story talk about how there is no conflict of interest but then Stuart asks that publishers, ad networks, AND advertising agencies to contact Rubicon Project too? Isn’t that the conflict? I don’t get it.

Posted by Forbes Reader | 3:41 pm on May 5, 2009.

As a publisher with over 10M unique visitors a month I have to say that RubiconProject didn’t provide any added value. If anything our ecpms dropped!

We moved to another company Pubmatic, which doesn’t charge for its service and does a much much better job at monetizing our inventory.

Posted by Michael | 4:44 am on May 6, 2009.

The Rubicon Project in my opinion is a trojan horse. They will aggregate all the ad networks and publishers under the ‘Visa’ infrastructure assumption story and once they achieve critical mass, they will allow advertisers to directly buy. The ad networks will be trapped by the need for reach/volume and the publishers will have a win win. This is not complex to understand. Rubicon will not be happy with thin margins in the end, the VCs will push them to alter the model. The silly ad networks have fallen for it, but within a year will learn their lesson.

Regardless of Forbe’s story flub, they actually forcasted the future.

> A very large Publisher

Posted by Jim | 6:51 pm on May 6, 2009.

Let me just get it out there (again) from the horse’s mouth: We do NOT work with advertisers or agencies directly.

No one– not Google and not us– could ever be the best at servicing all the needs of all advertisers. Someone will always be innovating and coming up with new solutions, ad products, ad optimization technology, creative development, data and so on. Rubicon’s job is to provide the infrastructure to enable that.

And, according to Think Equity’s recent report, the Secondary Premium (non-guaranteed, pre-emptable) ad market alone in the US alone is $15BN. We charge 15% for our service, so 15% of $15BN (and even larger market worldwide) is a $2.25BN opportunity. That’s an opportunity we’ll take.

Posted by Frank Addante | 12:35 pm on May 7, 2009.

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