After a couple months of confusion between the product I run for Right Media that was formerly titled RMX Direct, we’ve renamed it to Direct Media Exchange. The confusion came from the fact that the product was a simple publisher interface to participate in the Right Media Exchange which many people abbreviate to RMX, but people would often get confused between the Right Media Exchange as a whole and this product specifically. The similar names essentially caused people to think it was the same thing.
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Category Archives: Right Media
A Name Change: Direct Media Exchange
Correcting a False Statement
From MediaPost’s article “DoubleClick’s Ad Auction Plan Sweetens The Deal”
Of DoubleClick’s potential for success, Wittlake added: “DoubleClick has the potential to hit the ground running because it can bring its stable of publishers. Right Media talks about the number of participants it has and its thousands of sites, but they’re mostly represented by a network; they don’t have direct relationships with publishers directly.”
Nothing against Eric Wittlake who said the above quote, but that’s just not true. Right Media has a stable of direct relationships with large publisher clients on our PMX product, and has direct relationships with over a thousand small and medium-sized publishers through our RMX Direct product.
Some Interesting Press Today About Right Media
Two articles came out today that talk about Right Media that I thought I’d make some comments on. The first was in Businessweek and is about the rumored Google and Microsoft battle to buy DoubleClick. I’ve talked about those rumors a couple of times, but the Businessweek article is good because it talks about the value of ad exchanges and how they play into the relationship between these large web players and the advertising market.
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Fighting Against Errorsafe
MikeOnAds, a colleague of mine at Right Media, has taken on one of the dark parts of the online advertising world. He’s created a page that educates and suggests action for how to deal with the Errorsafe scam, a type of advertising that ends up installing nasty desktop software on user’s machines.
Give it a good read, there’s a lot there, but it’s important that people know about the problem and that the online advertising industry works to stop it.
Welcome to Bill Wise
Exciting news today as industry veteran Bill Wise has joined Right Media as the President of the Right Media-owned ad network Remix Media.
Bill was most recently the CEO of search marketing leader Did-It.com, and previous to that worked in executive positions at Doubleclick, MaxOnline, and Ask.com.
Bill’s role will be in growing the Remix Media business as he states:
“They’re now serving two billion impressions a day. They’ve gotten large very quickly. Right now, they’re representing a lot of remnant space,” he said. “But clearly, the strategy is how to go upstream, and that’s going to be a large part of my role.”
Glad to have you on board Bill.
BusinessWeek Covers Our Big Ambitions
The media is starting to pay a lot more attention to what we’re doing at Right Media, and for good reasons.
The latest article called “Right Media’s Big Ambitions” comes from BusinessWeek shortly after our first analyst day. The article is pretty good, and summarizes some of the successes and challenges well. It’s an exciting time but like any company playing in a competitive space we have to keep executing and innovating. I’m looking forward to it. This quote from our CEO Mike Walrath sums it up well:
“We hear people say, ‘What you’re doing, this is reinventing-an-industry-type stuff. You guys are too young to do this,’” says Walrath, 31. “But it doesn’t feel that way to us.”
If we listened to conventional wisdom, we never would have even gotten started.
Right Media Exchange Revenue Grows 81% in Six Months
We released a press release on Wednesday at Right Media that talks about some statistics for the Right Media Exchange over the last six months. Being a stats nut, I love this kind of stuff and thought it would be worthwhile to share here.
- Exchange revenue grew 81% in six months
- 566 billion ad impressions were traded during that period
- 49% increase in clients on the Exchange
- 84% increase in impressions served
- 50% increase in employee headcount
- Over 1 TRILLION impressions have been served since the exchange opened in April of 2005.
- There are currently 127 network, advertiser and publisher members with direct seats on the Exchange, including Yahoo!, Fox Interactive Media and LookSmart. Exchange members represent over 6,000 buyers and 13,000 sellers. More than 175,000 creatives are currently active in the Exchange.
Yikes, 1 trillion is a lot.
Learn About Your Ad Cookies
A fellow Right Media employee, friend, and one of the smartest ad guys I know named Mike Nolet is now blogging at MikeOnAds.com.
It looks like Mike is aiming to uncover mysteries and dispel some of the common myths about things in the ad business, and his first major post is a good one that teaches people about what’s in an advertising cookie. Many adware and spyware removal programs accuse cookies from ad companies as being spyware-related, when as Mike shows they aren’t that nefarious by explaining how they work and what’s really in an ad cookie.
I’m looking forward to learning more from Mike about many of the technical details of the ad network/exchange/technology world, so keep it up Mike!
Right Media In Business 2.0
In the latest issue of Business 2.0 they focus on the Next Net 25, and one of the articles is about “The quest for the perfect online ad” and features a good section about my employer Right Media. I thought there might be some more interesting stuff to focus on than how we fought back against spyware, but there were some nice comments and it’s some good press.
Also interesting in the article was Yahoo! and others saying that there is a huge opportunity in display advertising that’s still untapped that could potentially be bigger than search. That’s along the lines of a blog post written by Right Media CEO Mike Walrath in early January that questions if we’re underestimating display advertising.
Speaking at SXSW in Austin on March 10th
On March 10th in Austin I’ll be on the Online Publishers and Ad Networks panel at SXSW.
The panel will be moderated by publisher Jonathan Weber of NewWest.net, and will have me representing Right Media and the ad exchange market, Cody Simms of the Yahoo Publisher Network representing the contextual network market, Larry Allen of Tacoda covering behavioral targeting and ad networks, and Justin Ward from Feedburner covering RSS advertising.
Hopefully it will be educational and worthwhile, I know I’m looking forward to it. I’ve never been to SXSW, so I’m anxious to check out many of the other sessions and speakers as well.