2012 was a huge year of progress at Yieldbot. We started off the year by taking our second round of funding in February from true VCs that didn’t need to see “traction” before making their bet. With that investment we grew the company over the course of the year from 5 to 19 full-time employees in New York and Boston. Companies are about people first and we have put a together a tremendous team of data scientists, developers, engineers, strategists and sales people who have joined us from companies like Criteo, Microsoft, Kayak and the Wall Street Journal.

After two years of development from that small team of 5 we launched our real-time consumer intent marketplace in May. It was worth the effort. The amount of paid clicks in the Yieldbot marketplace has doubled every two months since we launched. Doubling the size of your business 4 times in 8 months presented numerous scaling challenges that touched all parts of the business. Our team handled them incredibly well.

We have a good number of the word’s leading brands and many other marketers large and small extending their Search budgets into Yieldbot to buy real-time intent on a performance (Pay Per Click) basis. Speaking of performance, in many cases advertisers are seeing results as good or better than what they see in Paid Search from traffic derived from Yieldbot. As most industry observers know, this is heretofore unseen. 

Best of all we truly unlocked a direct path for Search Marketing budgets to reach Premium Publishers and buy intent in real-time. This is an industry first and we consider it a monumental achievement in digital media. Yieldbot’s largest publisher partner is on a $2M 2013 run rate for new revenue - Search revenue. These are budgets they have never touched and their direct sales teams have never called on. We truly have created a new channel. That doesn’t happen very often.

In 2012 Publisher partners were stacking Yieldbot behind their sponsorships/direct sold impressions and ahead of exchange/network. That’s a great starting place but we aim to create much more value as our technology improves in 2013. We saw over 15M different consumer intentions across more than 2.7B page-views in 2012. The more data we capture the better we perform. This is one reason Yieldbot overall platform CTR (click-through rate) has gone up every month even as impression levels have skyrocketed. There are efficiencies created as markets get larger and those will benefit both Yieldbot advertisers and publishers. 

Major initiatives around automation and artificial intelligence were also started late in 2012 that will make optimization of Yieldbot performance completely automated. From campaign set-up and launch through goal management, the use of first party data and ad server integration creates an opportunity to reshape what is possible with marketing technology and reduce the resources necessary to manage campaigns.

We head into 2013 fully aware that we have not accomplished anything close to our goals and we are still at the beginning of building our business. We have 2 new verticals launching Q1 and more growth to manage ahead of us.  There is also pressure that comes from the sheer enormity of the opportunity in front of us. That’s a good thing. It was Billie Jean King that said “pressure is a privilege” and we’re privileged to be solving problems that bring the highest quality consumers, world's top marketers and premium content publishers together in a way that delivers relevance and value to each simultaneously. 

Should old acquaintance be forgot and never thought upon? Maybe. But if you did not make the acquaintance of Yieldbot in 2012 and you are a Search Marketer or Premium Publisher we hope you do in 2013. In the meantime, Happy New Year!