Upsetting The Status Quo
Competition can sneak up on a company when they don’t expect it and from a direction they would not have seen coming. One example, which may only illustrate my appreciation for Revenue Science, as opposed to point being made, involves how that company has become a force to reckon with in the online ad space. Revenue Science didn’t enter the online advertising world with intentions of becoming an ad network. They, instead, focused on building technology that would help sites such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and other content, category deep publishers make more money.
The example I always use when describing this form of behavioral targeting involves The Wall Street Journal always selling out of certain inventory, e.g., the Technology section. The site knows that many of its technology readers also visit the Weekend Journal section, which because of its less upscale content (movie and book reviews), commands a lower CPM. The Journal is right though in believing that readers of one do read the other, but the Journal can only target contextually, i.e. what the content talks about. If they could target to the user and not the content, then they could show a technology ad to a technology user regardless of that user’s location on the site. And, this is exactly what Revenue Science can do.
Revenue Science provides a tool that lets The Journal slice up its readers by the content they see and show ads to them wherever they are on a site. Having done this for enough sites, Revenue Science, all of the sudden, has access to a network of sites and can now sell behaviorally targeted ads across many sites in addition to that site selling its own inventory. There is no way a company could do this if they had been tasked with building an ad network of the top content sites; they would have thought along traditional approaches and missed the opportunity to become a network by beginning life almost as a tool for that site.
The low barriers to entry that existed in 2001 when a Fastclick could grow organically don’t exist today. A company has to find a way to build in new efficiencies, as clich
