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Why Publishers Should Embrace Programmatic Buying
Nov 30th
by Manny Puentes in Company, Lijit publishers, industry, technology
Those who “own” inventory are concerned that through exchanges, advertisers and trading desks have access to the same premium placements at lower CPMs, thereby diluting direct sales opportunities.
As a premium publisher, you probably invest in a sales team to monetize your inventory. You sell a unique readership, social engagement capabilities, contextual relevance, and other site-specific aspects that help value premium inventory at premium prices. Your team works hard to close direct deals with high CPMs to make sure the value of the inventory is not diluted so they can keep cash in their pockets!
On the other side of the coin is the brand advertiser. Brand advertisers also have concerns about exchanges because they are hyper-sensitive to brand alignment. They work hard to protect their brand from the “Wild West” we call the Internet, and are über-sensitive to the variability of content across the web.
Buying direct from premium publishers ensures contextual relevancy and protects against brand conflict. It’s the safe route that allows a brand advertiser to lock in contextually relevant real estate and track ROI.
A “true” private exchange turns potential dilution of inventory, internal struggles with the sales team, and contextual awareness into a big-time publisher opportunity. In a true private exchange, the sales team continues to work with advertisers to sell premium inventory. Let’s not forget what’s important to advertisers: (1) contextual placement and (2) guaranteed inventory/unique(s).
A “true” private exchange gives priority bidding to the select advertisers that have negotiated a higher mid-tier CPM. The CPM is higher than on an open exchange because it’s backed by data, yet lower than a premium CPM because it’s not guaranteed.
The industry needs to embrace true private exchanges. A “true” private exchange solves a real business problem for both the publisher and advertiser:
(1) Publishers can place inventory on a private exchange at a $3-$10 CPMs and offer it to a “select” set of advertisers
(2) Publishers can use the private exchange to build a process and compensation plan for the sales team
3) Advertisers feel safe using a private exchange that guarantees contextual placement and protects against brand conflict.
The private exchange is a true private marketplace where the prioritized advertiser with the highest bid wins.
Tags: ads, blogging, industry, Lijit Advertising Services | View Comments
We just released another software update and wanted to give everyone a heads up on what we’ve been working on. We continually strive to bring value to our publishers and advertising partners , and this release is no exception.
Share your Stats:
We are now making it really easy to add one of our engaging “Recent Readers” stats widgets to your site. Show your readers who else is visiting your site, where they are from, and how they found your site. It’s a fun way to show your readers more about your site and the community you are building around it . You can use the “Recent Readers List”, or the “Recent Readers Map, or both. Just login and visit your ”Wijits” menu and select the “Stats Wijits” tab to get the easy to install code.
Ad Tag Hints:
Having trouble deciding how to configure your Lijit ad tags? You can always contact us at support@lijit.com, but we also want to help you help yourself. Whenever you are creating or editing ad tags and setting a floor price , we now offer you helpful hints about the *average performance of that floor to help you make a more informed decision. Also, keep an eye out for our helpful hint image 
and just hover over it to get easy to understand descriptions of the terms and functionality on the Lijit website.
* These are examples only and your experience may vary based on how well your site aligns to existing ad campaigns.
Goodbye old friends:
We decided to remove some old features from our search widget that weren’t being used and tended to clutter the user experience for publishers configuring their widgets and for readers trying to interact with Lijit on your site. We removed the “Explore” and the “Surprise Me” features from the search widget. This will give us more room and flexibility to bring new enhancements and features to our search tools in the future. If you have any feedback about this change , don’t hesitate to drop us a line at feedback@lijit.com.
Everything Else:
This time around there was a lot of work going on behind the scenes. We spent a lot of time and energy(as we always do) further enhancing our advertising offerings to help us better optimize our ad campaigns and ultimately bring more value to our publishers.
As always, we build this product for you, and your feedback is invaluable when it comes to what we build next or what we should change. Leave a comment here or send us an email to share your feedback.
We’re honored to help spread the word about one of our favorite tech sites, Crenk. If it’s tech news you’re looking for, you’ll find it covered on this blog. Whether it’s product reviews, mobile apps, or something software-related, this blog has all the resources to guarantee that you’ll make an informed decision.
Steven, the founder of Crenk, was kind enough to write a post about using Lijit on his site, so it only makes sense that we return the favor. Plus, how can you not love a tech site that has a pink widget? I sent Steven some questions about his blogging experiences and I’m excited that he was game to answer them.
- How long have you been blogging and what made you start?
I have been blogging for a bit of a year now, since October 2007. I started blogging because I had a keen interest in startups and wanted to voice my opinions.
- What has been the greatest thing you’ve gotten from blogging?
Blogging has allowed me to actually talk about a topic I love and definitely helped me in learning how to express my thoughts correctly.
- Of all the posts you’ve written, what has been your favorite and why?
This is my favorite post because it actually has meaningful discussion in the comments.
- What are the top 3 tech tools that you love using and why?
Spotify (great for creating playlists and listening to in the office), Tweetdeck (it simplifies Twitter) and Filezilla (the best FTP program I have ever used).
- How has Lijit helped you as a blog publisher?
Lijit has simplified the search process for my blog. It allows me to easily add a great search tool and not have to worry about quality of search tool, plus allows me to focus on content.
In addition to the wonderful content he provides on his blog, Steven (using the Crenk name) is a poweruser on Twitter. You can follow him here and learn more about his blog here. Many thanks to Steven for helping us out with this interview and for using Lijit on his blog. We appreciate both!
This Wednesday, Frank Gruber and Eric Olson bring their traveling techie road show to Boulder for a second appearance. If you’ve never been to a TECH cocktail before, you’re in for an evening of fun. Imagine a bunch of tech enthusiasts, VCs, bloggers, and entrepreneurs drinking together, watching demos, and sending the geek quotient of the Boulder Theater through the roof. Yes, it really is that good. (And I’m not just saying that because Lijit is a sponsor…)
- Where? The esteemed Boulder Theater
- When? August 20th, from 6:30-9:00 PM (although the TC site says that it’s taking place EST, I wouldn’t bet on that, or we’re all going to be early…)
- Why? Duh…because geeks and beer are a great combination.
- How much? Totally free, but you must RSVP
Last time the boys brought the show to town, we found out that as a sponsor, Lijit was supposed to be one of the demos. We hadn’t really thought about that and, at the last moment, grabbed our homemade widget to bring with us to the party. People loved being turned into widgets, as Frank Gruber can attest…
While we’re not sure if the widget will make an appearance this time, the TechStars are coming out to play and they will be demoing their wares. TECH cocktail will be the conclusion to their day-long investor presentations, so you can imagine the relief these teams will be feeling. The TechStars have been working hard all summer and honestly…the least you can do is to come out and support your local tech community by drinking some beer. Is that too much to ask?
In conclusion…
What more could you want? (Unfortunately, due to the limited supply of Lychee liqueur, there will probably NOT be any Lijitos made at this event.) You can RSVP here and we hope to see you on Wednesday night!
Tags: Community, good times, lijit, tech events | View Comments
I’m proud to share another in a series of guest posts written by Lijit employees. This week we present an installment from Mike, who seemed overly excited about writing and sharing this post.
Hi, I’m Mike Merideth, the Director of IT here at Lijit, and I’m going to talk a little bit about the nuts and bolts of how we do what we do. Over the past year I’ve had the opportunity to design and implement the production network and server infrastructure on which Lijit runs. It’s been a great year of challenges and breakthroughs, but if there’s one key architectural concept that has gotten Lijit to where it is today, it is virtualization. We use Xen for our virtualization technology, which has the advantage of being free Software (both in the “free beer” sense and the “free speech” sense). CentOS 5.1 (a Linux distribution which is based on the market leader RedHat) includes this functionality out of the box, and has performed very well for us.
So why does Lijit use virtualization? There are a number of good reasons:
Flexibility: When you’re launching a new web product, it can be hard to predict what pieces of the application will need more resources than you originally gave them, and which will need less. We’re able to change the amount of memory, the number of CPUs and the amount of disk space a server has quickly, easily and remotely.
Availability: Because we use an iSCSI SAN for most all of our storage, we can move virtual servers between pieces of physical hardware. So if we lose one of our physical servers, we can quickly bring up the virtual servers it hosted somewhere else.
Resource utilization: CPUs today are incredibly fast and powerful; far more so than most applications need. Similarly, RAM has become cheap enough that a server with 16 or even 32 gigabytes of RAM is not particularly unusual, or particularly expensive. Running a simple web server on such a system would be a waste of CPU and memory, and therefore a waste of electricity. If you can run several virtual servers on such a system, however, you can get the maximum return on your investment by making sure you’re fully utilizing all of the CPUs and all of the RAM. Which is all tied to…
Cost savings: Colocation is expensive, and electricity certainly isn’t getting any cheaper. Using virtualization means we can get the absolute greatest value out of the rack space and electricity we’re paying for.
As of right now, we’re running about 200 virtual servers on about 25 physical servers. Just a few years ago we would have needed scores of physical servers consuming thousands and thousands of watts of power to do the work we’re able to do in this relatively modest environment. For a startup that would mean a higher burn rate with a shorter runway, and greater stock dilution for the founding stakeholders because of the amount of capital needed to get the work done. If you’re trying to get a tech startup off the ground, you owe it to yourself to see if you can leverage virtualization in your IT architecture. You’d really be crazy not too.
If you managed to read this post without your eyes glazing over, you may be interested in my new Linux infrastructure blog at http://linfrastructure.blogspot.com. I’m keeping notes on my experiences there, in the hopes that what I’ve learned over the past year can benefit others who find themselves in the same boat.
Photo credit: Leonard John Matthews
Tags: guest post, IT, Mike Meredith, virtualization | View Comments
Derek Greentree, one of our Senior Software Engineers, has agreed to share his thoughts on what he does here at Lijit. You can read the first part of this series here.
When you first start optimizing a website, there are many questions to answer. What are you optimizing for? Raw speed? Maximum concurrency? How will you determine the bottlenecks in your way? How will you test the optimizations you make to be sure they were real and not placebos? How will your optimizations scale? And finally, how much time are you willing to put in for what amount of return? A famous quote among software development people, coined by Donald Knuth, states that premature optimization is the root of all evil. Web applications are no exception.
First, you’ll need an environment where you can test your changes. You should have a test environment anyway, but this environment will exist mostly for benchmarking, which means you’ll be putting load on it, so you may want to have a separate environment just for load testing. Since you’re going to be deploying your optimizations eventually to your production servers, this environment needs to mimic your production architecture as closely as possible. Don’t load test on a machine that serves its content from a network share, when your production servers serve that content from local disk.
When you have an environment ready, your next step is to benchmark what you currently have. Many tools exist for this, but at Lijit, for website benchmarking, we use Siege. After a siege run, you’ll have data such as how many requests completed, the distribution of HTTP status codes, and average number of transactions per second. Be statistically smart about this – run several tests and average them together to get a baseline reading. Try to max out your environment; knowing when your overhead runs out in your current architecture is powerful knowledge. And, if you can max out your environment during the test, you can be sure the limits you’re hitting aren’t limits of the load testers, but the thing being tested. Try to hit your site in a browser during the load test so you can see what the user experience will be like in a high load situation. Anticipate problems before they occur.
Once you have these baseline numbers, you can test optimizations by running the same sequence of load tests and comparing the results. You can see if the various status codes coming back from the test changed. For example, if you deploy an optimization and start getting a lot of HTTP 500 instead of HTTP 200, you broke something.
Getting a good benchmarking environment setup is the essential first step to trying to optimize your site. In the next article, we’ll talk about some basic things to look at when approaching optimization, including whether you need to do it at all, and some specific examples of problems and solutions we’ve encountered at Lijit.