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Source:CenterNetworks

The Rubicon Project is announcing this morning that they have hit one billion ad impressions since their beta launch six weeks ago. The Rubicon Project allows publishers to maximize the revenue earned on their ad slots by showing the ad with the highest paying campaign at any particular point in time. This is a hot market today with other players such as YieldBuild and PubMatic.

One difference between Yieldbuild/Pubmatic and Rubicon is that Rubicon doesn’t require you to bring your own ad networks. This could be a big plus for smaller sites who can’t manage to get an ad network to approve them.

Rubicon is also serving ads on Zoominfo.com, AOL/Userplane and Beliefnet.net — this is where the billion served come from - not on small blogs. All of these services help you get the most out of your ad placements and I think it’s great. The ad networks themselves have had zero innovation in ten years. 

Editor’s note: PubMatic is a CN sponsor

Source:CenterNetworks

Yesterday Uncov went after Pownce, claiming that they are a fail and that "even Michael Arrington" can’t help them now after checking out an Alexa chart. In July I wrote that you "should never bring Alexa to a fight". It was true five years ago, it was true in July and it’s true today. Using charts (of any kind) in this Web 2.0 world is silly. Pownce/Twitter both have APIs - even using the tool offsite wouldn’t register on Alexa. This is why I’ve called for new metrics for years now.

Mike picked up the Uncov-bait, and wondered in the story title whether Pownce is headed for the Techcrunch deadpool.

I don’t know founder Leah Culver but I was wondering after reading both posts what some other startups might look like using Alexa. Uncov suggests that "you can look at virtually any Web 2.0 company and see a nearly-identical traffic graph". I would generally agree with that statement. Certainly Pownce has been overshadowed by Twitter based on API and those infected with Twitterdiction. I would suggest that Pownce is more on the lines of Tumblr than Twitter - in fact a marriage between Tumblr and Pownce might be sweet and long-lasting.

I selected Mint as my comparison site for this demo. It’s been written about a variety of times on Techcrunch, Mint won the Techcrunch award and they are now an advertiser on Techcrunch. Mint also has 5.45M funding, Pownce appears to have no funding. Using Uncov’s theory, I believe it’s a good comparison.

Here’s the Alexa comparison chart for both Mint and Pownce. I’ve animated it (5 sec) to show six months and seven days respectively. It’s easy to see that Pownce is ranked higher and slowly trending higher than Mint. So if based on an Alexa chart, Pownce is a fail, is Mint a fail as well?

This entry was posted on Friday, December 21st, 2007 at 10:45 am and is filed under Insights, Pownce, Mint. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.