Nexstar Media Group revealed on Thursday its intent to acquire mobile video platform LKQD for $90 million. The all-cash transaction is accretive and subject to certain terms, including LKQD maintaining a $10 million minimum cash balance. LKQD’s payment is also contingent upon its performance under Nexstar for the next two years. The deal is expected […]
Will Dmexco become a no-go? Late last week, the organizers of the Digital Marketing Exposition & Conference (Dmexco) in Germany abruptly severed ties with the show’s two co-founders, Christian Muche and Frank Schneider, sparking concerns over Dmexco’s future. Reports alleged that Dmexco’s organizer and the event’s trademark holders had parted ways with Muche and Schneider’s consulting […]
Rubicon Project eliminated its buy-side fees Wednesday. “This ties directly to the commitment I made when I joined the company earlier this year to normalize our pricing and bring a higher level of transparency to everything we do,” CEO Michael Barrett said in a blog post released just prior to Rubicon’s Q3 earnings Thursday. Removing […]
Rubicon Project has been steadily lowering its take rate over the past year to make its tech more appealing to publishers and buyers, who have pushed back against hidden fees. During its earnings call Tuesday, the company revealed that the declining take rates are one part of its strategy to offer the most value for […]
Story updated at 1:40 p.m. Rubicon Project has acquired nToggle, a startup that builds infrastructure to streamline bid requests, for $38.5 million, the companies revealed Monday. NToggle’s technology uses machine learning to weed out impressions a DSP is better off not bidding on through a process known as “traffic shaping.” This capability is increasingly important […]
RTB whiz Neal Richter is the new CTO at Rakuten Marketing, the marketing solutions subsidiary of Japanese ecommerce giant Rakuten. Richter, who serves as a technical adviser to a number of ad tech startups, including Metamarkets and nToggle, joins the company after more than seven years with Rubicon Project, most recently as CTO. At Rakuten, […]
Welcome to AdExchanger Talks, a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. Rubicon Project’s new CEO, the storied Michael Barrett, comes into the studio for the latest episode of AdExchanger Talks. And he doesn’t disappoint, talking in-depth about the company’s roadmap and fee structure. Barrett has known Rubicon Project since its inception 10 years ago, when […]
Rubicon Project posted another quarter of significant declines as new CEO Michael Barrett attempts to turn around the business. Revenue declined 34% YoY to $46 million in the first quarter. Advertising spend declined 23%, to $191.5 million. Though the revenue slightly beat expectations, the stock slid a few percentage points in after-hours trading. Take rates […]
IPONWEB might have made its name building ad tech for other vendors, but it’s increasingly hoping to directly service agencies, brands and publishers. An expanding 35% of IPONWEB’s business comes directly from media buyers and owners, and in late February, the company brought on Rubicon Project and Spotify vet Jana Jakovljevic to build out its […]
Rubicon Project founder Frank Addante has stepped down as CEO. Former AdMeld and Millennial Media chief Michael Barrett is Rubicon’s new CEO, effective immediately. Addante will switch to a strategic and advisory role as chairman of Rubicon’s board. Barrett has a history of turning companies around and getting them sold. As CEO of Millennial Media, he took a company […]
News Corp. is shifting allegiance from Rubicon Project to AppNexus. News Corp. offloaded its entire 8% investment in Rubicon Project, or 3.9 million shares, according to an SEC filing on Friday. Last September, News Corp. invested $10 million in AppNexus. It also signed a master services agreement, enabling its publications to switch over to AppNexus […]
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Tom Kershaw, chief product and engineering officer at Rubicon Project. In the next three years, nearly 700 million new consumers will access the internet for the very first time, according […]
If Rubicon Project officially goes on the selling block, what are its prospects? The company, which has hired Morgan Stanley to explore a sale, according to The Wall Street Journal, has suffered from tanking stock, layoffs and leadership changes over the past year, and it apparently isn’t the only company of its kind in play. […]
Who’s left at Rubicon Project? This year, a wave of senior executives left Rubicon Project, hollowing out the ranks. A company that prided itself on building a strong workplace culture in sunny Los Angeles now faces discontent with what some have described as product missteps and a lack of strategy at the top. Among the […]
“AdExchanger Politics” is a weekly column tracking developments in the 2016 political campaign cycle. Today’s column is written by Theresa Mueller, director of political and advocacy at Rubicon Project. The 2016 presidential election marks what is expected to be the largest digital election in history, but with the flood of more than 1 billion dollars […]
While “programmatic technology” has come a long way, many longtime players in the space are now reckoning with the term. AppNexus CEO Brian O’Kelley penned op eds about the “death of programmatic.” Rubicon Project SVP of market development Jay Sears also has acknowledged the limitations of the terminology. AdExchanger reached out to ad tech executives, some […]
Rubicon Project CEO Frank Addante told investors on Tuesday that the company was slow to recognize the importance of header bidding to its publisher customers. As a result, desktop managed revenue declined 2% in Q2. That unexpected drop led Rubicon to lower its revenue guidance for the year. Rubicon’s FastLane header bidding product did not enter the […]
Rubicon Project enjoyed a strong first quarter, growing overall advertising revenue by 26% year over year, while its cut of the revenue swelled even more. Non-GAAP net revenue reached $63.6 million, a 71% year-over-year increase. That’s largely because Rubicon Project acquired the DSP Chango a year ago to form its Buyer Cloud, causing take rates […]
Premium video scarcity and the rise of in-feed mobile video have created the perfect storm for an explosion of outstream video – a format that, instead of running instream as pre-roll or mid-roll, is either embedded between article content or within a slideshow. Thus, these formats don’t need to be attached to publisher’s video content to […]
A group of publishers is testing a header bidding solution from Rubicon Project that is compliant with Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages program. Tribune Publishing is among those who have implemented header bidding for AMP. It’s the first time header bidding functionality has been leveraged in support of the “platform publishing” craze that has lately seen […]
Rubicon Project’s full-year financials paint a picture of a growing exchange. The company’s managed revenue hit $1 billion in 2015. With a growing take rate, 22.6% for the year, that tallied up to $227.3 million, an 81% annual increase. The amount Rubicon takes from transactions on its exchange increased from 19.3% in Q4 of 2014 […]
Best practices and policies to deal with fraud and botnets are emerging, but ad tech companies aren’t sharing them with each other – partially because they don’t want their secrets to slip out to fraudsters, and partially because ad fraud detection is a competitive differentiator. As a result, companies are developing their own policies and […]
Automated guaranteed will color direct deals in TV in a big way, not just in digital, predicts Scott Braley, GM of programmatic at Telstra-owned video platform Ooyala. While traditional TV teams are accustomed to buying on a reserved basis, automated guaranteed deals could diversify the direct orders process. Broadcasters could subsequently gain more flexibility around […]
Zynga has made 100% of its direct-sold inventory available for purchase programmatically, courtesy of Rubicon Project’s guaranteed orders capability. Buyers can access all of the premium Zynga ad formats, including “sponsored play” and “gamified units,” exclusively through Rubicon Project, a process that took months to set up. The deal offers important upsides for both Zynga […]
In campaign speeches, TV appearances and public statements, Donald Trump frequently boasts about his campaign’s low ad spending. “I’ve spent no money and I’m No. 1,” he said recently on the “Today” show. “Other people have spent tens of millions of dollars and they’re floundering and doing poorly.” Unfortunately for his opponents, this statement – […]
Header bidding is coming to mobile apps, via a solution Rubicon Project is beta testing with 20 publishers. Early results for the product, FastLane, saw CPM increases of up to 300%. Rubicon will release the product more widely to publishers in Q1 of next year. Unlike the mobile web or desktop, mobile apps bring in […]
Online political spending – while still trailing far behind the budgets assigned to TV – is poised to match or exceed even the world’s largest brand advertisers. But with no established agency or ad tech model in place, agnostic tech providers are looking to blaze new trails in the hypercompetitive DC market. Rubicon Project and […]
Chango recorded 2014 revenues of $43 million prior to its acquisition by Rubicon Project, according to a new US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing. But the company was not profitable, despite being an early player in the lucrative retargeting niche. It reported a loss of just under $1 million for the year. Read the 8-K. […]
This week at the Cannes Lions festival, Rubicon Project hosted its annual discussion of some of the world’s most powerful digital media buyers. This panel has historically comprised the leaders of the four largest holding company trading desks, but this year was different – with senior buyers from IPG, Publicis, Dentsu and Bank of America. […]
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Adam Chandler, senior vice president of revenue at Rubicon Project’s Buyer Cloud. As more brands discuss in-house automation strategies, there is an increasing need to educate brand marketers on the […]
