Rubicon Acquires Audience Profile Company, Others Online; Google Adx Official Launch Imminent

Rubicon Buys Others Online

Yield optimisation specialists, Rubicon, looked to beef up its targeting capabilities this week by announcing it has acquired Others Online for an undisclosed sum. Others Online specialises in the segmentation of a publisher’s audience, enabling site owners to profile users.

Rubicon clearly sees targeting as an important element of their future offering to ad networks and publishers. We are quickly moving into a market where audience is becoming more important than context to advertisers.

Audience segmentation will be a key part of the Rubicon optimisation platform. And with 100 million profiles now available to them through the acquisition of Others Online, they’ll be able to deliver the specific audiences ad networks are requesting.

Wary of previous misconceptions about who it actually sells ad inventory to, Rubicon makes the following clear in a press release to its publisher and ad network clients:

- We are not selling data. We are using the data from 3rd party providers, combined with the publisher’s site data, to identify patterns in online user activity to create defined audience segments that you can sell.

- We are still not an ad network, behavioural or otherwise. And, we do not work directly with advertisers.

- We are an Ad Sales Optimization company at heart. This mean we work with the entire internet advertising eco-system which, in part, means working with the widest variety of data available (behavioural, contextual, intent-based, search, geographic, demographic, etc.).

Google Adx Official Launch Imminent

The new Google ad exchange has been live in Europe for a while. Invited agencies, advertisers and publishers have trading on the platform for the past two months with varying success – and Google are now looking to open it up publicly.

According to Clickz, Google are set launch the exchange officially at the Advertising Week in New York at the end of September.

Google should have a lot of inventory and buyers from the start. Thousands of European publishers using DFP will be able to put unsold inventory on the exchange, providing plenty of trading opportunities for agencies, advertisers and adsense buyers.

There is speculation about whether or not Google will allow agencies, which don’t use its DFA, to trade on the exchange.

These agencies could be big volume buyers, and the initial success of the platform will rest on how open it is to those not using Goggle’s technology.

Regardless, it should introduce new competition to the exchange marketplace – and hopefully kick start the adoption of the exchange model by agencies, advertisers, ad networks, and most importantly publishers.