Rubicon is Third Largest Internet Platform, CEO Frank Addante
Amidst gloom and doom news of tightening ad budgets and massive media layoffs, advertising technology company The Rubicon Project is seeing phenomenal growth. “”The online advertising economy is still healthy. There’s no signs of decline just yet,” CEO Frank Addante told me at the AlwaysOn Conference in New York today, where Rubicon was named Company of the Year.
The Rubicon Project, which pioneered the category of ad network optimization, saw 80 percent revenue growth and tripled its marketshare basis over the last quarter. It serves as an online marketplace for buyers and sellers, working with 1300 publishers, including USA Today and The Washington Post, and 375 of the 400 online ad networks. According to Quantcast, it is now the largest platform behind Google and Yahoo.
In the segment, Addante explains how the economic recession could actually be good news for advertisers. He compares it to the downturn in 2001, when the advertising market moved toward performance and Google took off as a result.
“Fast forward eight years. We’re seeing the same thing, pressure is coming down, advertising is going to move toward performance, but here’s the difference. It’s not just Google sitting there with the big catcher’s mitt anymore. Now there are 400 ad networks out there that exist primarily because they’ve geared themselves for performance,” he says.”Last year a billion dollars was invested into ad networks that’s going straight to innovation and business models that are all performance-based. So I think this market is going to be a very different one, and it’s not just going to be Google this time around, it’s going to be these other 400. So it’s certainly a good time to be in the advertising business and certainly a good time to be an ad network.”
–Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer