I’m excited to announce our Series A-1 round of funding for Yieldbot. The $5M round was lead by RRE Ventures who has invested at every stage of our development and continues to show amazing support for our original vision that we’ve been executing on the past 3 years.Existing investors New Atlantic Ventures, kbs+ Ventures, Common Angels, Neu Ventures and Board member Cathie Black participated as well. To date Yieldbot has raised $10.5 million over three rounds of funding.

It’s an exciting time for Yieldbot. We spent our first two years building a technology foundation and now enter the second year of our real-time intent marketplace. We have proven the value of our real-time intent technology and data by delivering performance for Marketers that meets and exceeds the ROI they are getting from Search. Never before has this type of performance been seen in another channel by these marketers. That’s why we are fortunate to count some of the largest direct Search advertisers and many SEM arms of major agency holding companies as clients.

Our ROI performance allows the other constituent in our marketplace and the source of the data, premium publishers, to connect directly to SEM budgets for the first time since the inception of Paid Search. Considering the mounting monetization challenges premium publishers face this is a major market development. We’re fortunate to count leading media companies like Meredith, Rodale, Remedy Health, BlogHer, BabyCenter, Internet Brands and many others as partners. We’re closing in on 1.5 Billion Page Views a month of real-time intent. Compared to search query volume this would make Yieldbot the 3^rd largest real-time intent source on the web behind Google and Yahoo/Bing.

All of this wouldn’t be possible without an amazing team of (at this writing 25) people starting with our CTO Rich Shea and our Chief Data Scientist Soren Macbeth. I also want to mention our platform architect Dave White and our javascript guru Erik Solen who have both been building Yieldbot since the early days.

It’s still early days. We’re travelling through uncharted territory of first-party big data mixed with real-time decisioning. That’s the way we like. The learning we’ve accumulated over the last three years in this space has been tremendous. We’re excited to learn more and keep building something different. More than one marketer told us this past year that Yieldbot is their secret weapon. A year from now we anticipate Yieldbot will not be so secret anymore.

This post celebrates an anniversary. A year ago today and based on two years of prior work building our real-time intent technology, we launched what we think is by far the best business model for the web. We launched a real-time keyword marketplace. It’s one of the few ever created outside of Search.
A year ago we started with 3 publisher web sites and 1 advertiser. Yieldbot now is deployed on over 60 premium websites and content networks within the three verticals serving 125 cost-per-click campaigns.
We all love stats at Yieldbot so here are some more stats about Yieldbot.
We’ve made 5,753,199,447 real-time match decisions (most have been NOT to serve an ad)
Yieldbot crunches 14TB of data a day
Revenue has doubled every 2 months since launch.
The most important stat is of course results. The vast majority of Yieldbot advertisers get performance at or exceeding their Search Marketing efforts. Our work has no precedent there.
Our second advertiser gave us an idea we were onto something. After 6 weeks buying on Yieldbot they reported that our conversion rate was 35% better than Paid Search. Then our third advertiser told us a similar story. We’ve kept hearing it and it never gets old.
Yieldbot marketplace connects the two largest channels of digital ad supply and demand. Premium publishers get the performance technology they absolutely need to survive digital. Search Marketers get much-needed new inventory. Parties that never did business with each other before now do it transparently and in real-time through Yieldbot. It’s a wonderful thing to behold.
You might be asking yourself how does this work? What is Real-Time Intent?
People browse the web with purpose and direction. A real-time “why” is the most powerful targeting dimension Marketing has ever known.
Yieldbot works to understand the real time “why” a person is clicking to any and every page of web page. We do this through our advanced keyword navigation path analytics, our applied data science and our intelligent real-time match decisions.
So one year in and we’ve won the trust of many of the leading media brands and advertising budgets on the web. Now it’s time for Yieldbot to build on that foundation. We’ve launched our Mobile solution and our real-time intent has caught interest in Social advertisers as well as Search. We’re psyched.
We still fully manage the campaigns ourselves and source our own demand. Until we fully make it a self -serve business we know to a large extent we cannot truly be a market. We are working towards opening Yieldbot up through APIs to a number of demand partners by early 2014.
Real-time click-stream intelligence is an area where few have ever ventured. Our data science team, our engineering team, our sales and business development team and our account strategy teams are learning for ourselves what Yieldbot is, what it can be and what it should be. The early results are astounding to even us. Year 1 was an incredible journey. The journey continues. We hope you join us on it.

As we move through the second quarter of the year, the remarkable shift in the balance of power in media buying and selling online continues and the ad side has never been more empowered. But, there are tactics that publishers can deploy to fight back and create value and insights that drive results for their advertisers while satisfying their users.

Today, media buyers are not only defining narrower audiences for media publishers to deliver, but more importantly, they are coming to publishers with defined data sets of their own – hence BYOD (Bring Your Own Data) – and they only want to buy the users they are interested in. No one else – just the users they want. This trend has accelerated tremendously in the past 12 months because of the confluence of two powerful developments that literally have had an exponential effect when combined.

First, new ad side data and insights have come on the market and taken hold with many advertisers. For example, retargeting has proven to be an effective means of driving business from existing customers, especially for retailers, and many companies work to service that need.

Second, the rise of programmatic buying and exchanges has given these new ad side tools efficient access to more and more users to scale, bypassing the typical publisher direct relationship. And the introduction of FBX (the Facebook Exchange) allows BYOD advertisers access to literally billions and billions of impressions at a fraction of the expense of traditional display inventory.

BYOD in online advertising is part of a broader trend toward addressable media that goes well beyond online. For simplicity, let’s define addressable media as the targeting of advertising to a specific consumer or household through data through a media channel. The data can come from either the advertiser side or the publisher side, sometimes a combination of the two, and frequently will include a third-party data provider. For instance, an insurance company ran a TV campaign recently for renter’s insurance in collaboration with two satellite TV providers targeted only to households that had been identified as rentals.

This shift is certainly turning traditional media selling online on its ear. Just a few years ago, a media seller would be touting the content of a site, the overall user demographics of the site and its index against a desired demographic set and it would have been enough to win an advertiser’s business. Today, an advertiser might not care about any of those factors when using their BYOD strategy, and they are likely to want to isolate just a fraction of a site’s users.

And, this trend is even scarier for online publishers with inventory on exchanges where they likely have no idea why the advertiser is buying media from them. The publisher will know the advertiser and the CPM rate but is very removed from the why? Was it a retargeted ad for a golf retailer? Was it a data match for a Caribbean traveler? Was it a user interested in a new car?

Do you want to be a publisher in a business where you don’t know why advertisers are buying your media?

There’s a slippery slope here and many publishers have started to experience the downhill trend – a loss of control, a loss of insights, a loss of advertisers and lower CPM’s overall, not higher.

It’s imperative that the online publishing community embraces a BYOD strategy of their own. Publishers must look to their audience and their behaviors and create meaningful insights that fuel ad matches with the needs of marketers. This BYOD effort by publishers has to begin with truefirst-party data about the site and the user experience. While many publishers are embracing DMP’s (Data Management Platform), consider the data sets being utilized by the DMP.They are often commoditized third-party data sets that advertisers already use on exchanges and elsewhere. And unless you have massive scale as a publisher, this commoditized data won’t really be helpful. Publishers need to create new first-party data that is differentiated and put it to use to meet the needs of advertisers and also their site’s users who are seeking a relevant, timely experience both in the content they seek and the ads they interact with.

There are few companies today that have taken on the BYOD challenge directly to help publishers. Yieldbot is one of those companies and we are working daily to provide our publisher partners incredible intelligence into first-party session-based user intent, the most powerful targeting signal of all. Yieldbot is also creating a new channel of advertising revenue for publishers by matching search advertisers with real-time user intent, creating a highly relevant and satisfying experience for users.

The opportunity has never been greater and by all measures the overall online ad spend will continue to grow. But, the risks are also high and the distribution of dollars between search, social, mobile, display, exchanges and new platforms remains to be determined. Advertisers have a lot of options and if you are a publisher whose data would you prefer to be working with? This isn’t a winner take all market, but publishers that embrace BYOD and create true data and insights into their site experience and users stand a strong chance to create separation in the market and drive value for their advertising partners and their audience.

I know…that’s a pretty bold statement. But it’s true. Buried in our press release about Cathie Black joining our board were the quotes every marketing technology since 2004 or so has been hoping to have its customers say about it:

"We use Yieldbot for a number of different clients here at TargetCast, and have been seeing search-like performance on the front end, and more importantly, on the back end of our campaigns. Yieldbot has opened up a whole new marketplace for our clients to connect directly with the real-time mindset of their consumers in the publisher domain.”

- Philippe Sloan, TargetCast SVP Interactive Marketing Director

This is not an accident. We have spent the last 2.5 years building for this. Our goal was always to capture this intent where it is most valuable, premium content, and connect it to Search Marketers starving for a new channel. Our thesis, born from years of experience in performance marketing, was always that consumer intent in media outside of Search was just as valuable as Search intent. Why wouldn’t it be? Search does not create any intent. Intent moves to Search for navigation and then Search pays it forward into content.

Building a technology to capture real-time intent and then activating it to achieve Search levels of marketer performance are why CTOs of other companies have left and joined our team. Why people from Criteo, Kayak, Microsoft, Wall Street Journal, IAC have left those great companies to be part of something revolutionary. None of this happens without the amazing team of people at Yieldbot.

On the data side, the brightest minds in real-time data led by Chief Data Scientist Soren Macbeth are pioneering new ways of capturing, shaping and activating first party data on premium publishers every day. On the platform side the brightest minds in piping data led by our CTO Rich Shea are building a self-learning platform that makes real-times decisions – the scale of which would make Yieldbot the fourth largest search engine in the US.

“Yieldbot’s intent-based advertising has provided us with a critical supplement to our paid search efforts. The conversion rate performance and number of conversions are equal to, and have sometimes exceeded, those of our SEM.”

- Marin Rowe, Alliance Health Networks Marketing Manager

So it’s time to toot our horn a little.

Search divisions at 3 of the 5 major agency holding companies buy real-time intent on Yieldbot. One of the largest direct buyers of Search buys real-time consumer intent Yieldbot. We have case study after case study from leading brand after leading brand showing our performance levels for volume and conversions matching and often exceeding SEM.

People said it couldn’t be done. After 2.5 years of building and 10 months of our marketplace our advertisers are telling us with confidence it’s been done. We’re telling them and you that we’re just getting started. It will only get better.

Black will advise Yieldbot on its strategic direction as the Company continues to grow its real-time consumer intent marketplace for advertisers and premium publishers.

NEW YORK, New York – March 27, 2013 – Yieldbot today announced it has appointed Cathleen Black to its Board of Directors, effective March 18, 2013. An experienced media executive and business leader, Black will advise Yieldbot on its strategic direction as the Company grows its real-time consumer intent marketplace.

“We are extremely excited to welcome Cathie to Yieldbot’s Board of Directors,” said Jonathan Mendez, Yieldbot Founder and CEO. “Cathie’s leadership and knowledge within the media and publishing industry is extensive. Her experience and perspective will be invaluable to Yieldbot as we continue to bring new revenue streams to publishers and better results for advertisers through our real-time consumer intent marketplace.”

“It is very exciting to join the board of such a promising company at this early stage and to play a role in its growth and success,” said Black. “Yieldbot’s technology is at the forefront of the real-time data and analytics evolution, and has the potential to bring important new insight to publishers as to how they view their data and use it to deliver better experiences to audiences in the form of content and advertising.”

Black was President, then Chairman of Hearst Magazines, one of the world’s largest publishers of monthly magazines, for 15 years, and oversaw such titles as Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Harper’s Bazaar, O, The Oprah Magazine, and nearly 200 international editions. Called “the First Lady of Magazines,” Black has been named to Fortune Magazine’s andForbes’ “Most Powerful Women in Business” lists numerous times. Black was also President and Publisher of USA Today for 7 years in its beginning.

Black served on the boards of IBM and the Coca-Cola Company for 20 years, before becoming Chancellor of New York City Schools in 2010. She is a member of the National Council of Foreign Relations and her book, Basic Black: The Essential Guide for Getting Ahead at Work (and in Life), is a New York Times bestseller.

Black joins Yieldbot 10 months after the launch of its real-time consumer intent marketplace. The marketplace currently captures 1.6 billion real-time consumer intentions each month across its base of premium web publishers. Yieldbot makes these intentions available for purchase by search marketers to match ads against in real time. The Company has doubled its advertising revenue every two months since the marketplace’s launch.

"We use Yieldbot for a number of different clients here at TargetCast, and have been seeing search-like performance on the front end, and more importantly, on the back end of our campaigns,” said TargetCast SVP Interactive Marketing Director Philippe Sloan. “Yieldbot has opened up a whole new marketplace for our clients to connect directly with the real-time mindset of their consumers in the publisher domain.”

“Yieldbot’s intent-based advertising has provided us with a critical supplement to our paid search efforts,” said Alliance Health Networks Marketing Manager Marin Rowe. “The conversion rate performance and number of conversions are equal to, and have sometimes exceeded, those of our SEM.”

Yieldbot’s publisher base has grown exponentially, as well, tripling page views each quarter since the marketplace’s launch.

“Yieldbot is looking at publisher data in a way that no other company has done before,” said Black. “Its technology can be very powerful for media companies seeking to transform their businesses in today’s digital environment.”

“Cathie’s whole career has been forward-looking,” said Mendez. “Cathie’s joining us validates the importance of what we’re doing for publishers and premium content providers.”

With Black’s appointment, Yieldbot’s Board of Directors now comprises five members, including Scott Johnson, Founder & Managing Partner, New Atlantic Ventures; Jonathan Mendez, Founder & CEO, Yieldbot; Jerry Neumann, Partner, Neu Venture Capital; and Eric Wiesen, General Partner, RRE Ventures.

To learn more about Yieldbot’s products and services, its real-time consumer intent marketplace, and how publishers can increase their yields while advertisers strengthen their intent-based marketing results, please visit our website.

About Yieldbot

Founded in 2010, Yieldbot captures, organizes and activates real-time consumer intent before, after and outside of search, creating a new marketing channel for advertisers and new revenue streams for publishers. Through its real-time consumer intent marketplace, Yieldbot enables advertisers to deliver ads at the exact moment consumers are most open to receiving relevant marketing messages. The Yieldbot marketplace currently captures 1.6 billion intentions each month and frequently delivers performance equivalent to, or stronger than, search marketing performance.

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