Contact: Scott Denne
Rubicon Project has picked up two companies to move further beyond a marketplace for leftover ad inventory. The purchases of iSocket and Shiny Ads should enable Rubicon to offer publishers automated selling of direct-sold media. The deals are aimed at enticing publishers to use Rubicon to manage other forms of inventory, rather than just deploy it as an outlet for unsold media. But the price tag for the two targets speaks to the nascence of this portion of the ad market.
Rubicon shelled out less than $30m, mostly in stock, in total consideration for both companies (including earnouts). The lion’s share of that will go to iSocket, which is being acquired for $10m up front and as much as $12m in earnout payments. LUMA Partners advised iSocket on its sale.
Adding automation and software to the direct sale of large chunks of advertising inventory certainly brings efficiencies to a sector that’s been transacted through a combination of emails, faxes, meetings and phone calls. Publishers, however, aren’t convinced that efficiency will necessarily translate into more revenue. For that reason, this corner of the ad tech market is still in its early stages.
The real-time ad exchange segment continues to grow rapidly, but for the largest publishers, it likely only accounts for a small portion of their media sales. Rubicon Project has reached for two companies that provide products to help publishers automate the process of selling media directly to advertisers. Such tools are still a niche portion of the automated advertising universe, but offering them to customers gives Rubicon a way to deepen its relationship with large publishers and morph into a broad workflow and automation stack for selling ads beyond the ad marketplace for leftover inventory that it is today.
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