Andrew Rollins

I noticed this article about Pubmatic today on TechCrunch, and I found it interesting. It includes a video of Amar Goel, founder and CEO, presenting at TechCrunch 40. They were a 2007 TechCrunch 40 finalist, and the company is based in India.

Pubmatic is an ad optimization service. Think of it as aggregating the different ad services out there (Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network, etc.) in order to maximize the return you get on your ad space. While it seems mostly targeted at publishers - people who want to display advertisements on their own site - they also provide some features for those of us who want to place ads.

For publishers, the idea behind Pubmatic is simple. They automatically pick and display the highest paying, highest converting advertisements out of the major ad networks, allowing the publisher to increase their ad revenue.

It certainly sounds like something I could use, but how does Pubmatic make money? For now, the service is free to their beta users, but eventually they’ll need to take a cut or have some sort of fee. I’ll have to keep tabs on this service and similar services and see how they develop in the future.

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While doing my usual daily perusal of digg, I found a useful video of Stacy Williams describing some liberties that Google and Yahoo may take with your search engine ad campaigns. This short video (just under 4 minutes) was filmed at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in Chicago, and in it Stacy touches on the following three points:

• Sometimes ads are not active even if Google/Yahoo say they are (because they are actually in the process of editorial review).
• Search engines may change your ad match types (broad vs exact and so on) sometimes without notification. Stacey gives a funny example.
• Swapping of text ad titles and descriptions in certain scenarios.

The moral for us online entrepreneurs is that if you are using search engine advertising to promote your new business, you may need to pay closer attention to those ads than you thought.

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