PubMatic gets ad networks to fight for you
Run a Web site or blog and don't know which of the several advertising networks to use? Just use Google AdSense and call it a day. No, wait, that's not right. PubMatic has an alternate idea: Get competing ad networks (Google, Yahoo, ValueClick, Komli, and BlueLithium for now; more to come) to bid for your site's eyeballs.
PubMatic has a clever model that brokers your site's traffic to the various networks, and swaps out their ad modules depending on which one pays better. The service also continuously modifies the layout of ad modules and tries to lock in the ones that work best for your site.
PubMatic's Yahoo widget shows you how your ads are performing.
(Credit: PubMatic)There's also a cute widget (for the Yahoo Widget Engine) so you can track your site's ad performance in near real time.
The service is free during this beta phase. Considering what the service does, that's the deal of the century. But as a business model, it's insane. This service is as much about inserting itself in the economics of Web publishing as it is about the technology it does to do so. And the people who run this product should have an idea of how it's going to be part of that economy, or at least should be experimenting with ways how. If, as founder Amar Goel says in e-mails and press materials, his service was able to increase ad revenue 90 percent on a customer's site, and if PubMatic isn't confident enough to extract a piece of that bounty for itself, there's something that doesn't add up. In his defense, Goel did tell me he plans to charge for the service, but first he wants to drive adoption.
PubMatic is participating at the TechCrunch 40 event and is opening up to public beta today.
Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe. 
I understand they are in "beta" but the first thing that was disappointing was a lack of customer support. We emailed them for assistance with a few items and received only an automated reply. Then three days later we received another automated reply asking if our issue was resolved to our satisfaction. But nothing in between.
In terms of the service itself, we were running Google and Kimla. And the numbers they showed in their reports didn't come close to matching what Google showed, which had us concerned over what was truly showing. In addition, they reported us as making an average of less than one cent per click.
We've since gone back to our inhouse scripts for rotating ads. Perhaps we'll give them another try once they've worked out their kinks, but not right now. The major kink they need to work on, however, is their customer service.
Chris Adams
Crystal Air Productions
www.crystalair.com
Chris mentioned some issues with customer service. Customer service is one facet of PubMatic that we pride ourselves on, as we have 24 hour coverage for customer service. I looked into his account, and it appears that we answered each of his email inquiries in under 20 hours with human generated (as opposed to machine generated) responses. It's possible these emails fell into Chris' junk email folder or for some other reason they weren't properly delivered to him.
Chris also mentioned an issue with impression tracking. Without talking to him directly, I don't know what the cause of that issue is and I therefore won't speculate about it in this forum. I have not received other reports of impression tracking issues from the other 800+ publishers who are using PubMatic, but it is possible there is an issue that needs to be examined.
I have contacted Chris separately via email and look forward to discussing this issue one-on-one with him, but I did want to clarify my understanding of the situation.
Thanks.
Rajeev Goel
General Manager, PubMatic
rajeev . goel (at) pubmatic . com