Connecting The Censored Internet: AnchorFree CEO David Gorodyansky, Mountain View, CA (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What is the ad server infrastructure that supports 2 billion page view a month?

David Gorodyansky: It is our own infrastructure. We work with a lot of partners to sell the ads. We have hired a lot of engineers but not a lot of ad sales people. We partner with companies like Yahoo! and AOL to sell the advertising for us.

Sramana Mitra: Does the algorithm that determines who sees what ads reside on your servers?

David Gorodyansky: It depends if they want to contextually target or not. Some advertisers do not care, they just want their advertising seen by a lot of users. Advertisers who want to target based on context can do so based on the content of the page, not the user. If you want your ads on Cars.com or the Wall Street Journal, you can put your ads there.

Sramana Mitra: The Wall Street Journal sells its own ads.

David Gorodyansky: The platform works in a specific way to allow us to conduct advertising. When the user turns on the platform and opts into our terms of use, the first thing they get when they reach AnchorFree is a welcome screen. That page has a search box, a video ad, and some display ads. The user can stay on the page or go wherever they want.

Let’s assume the user leaves the home page and goes to CNN.com, Facebook, and then Google. Every page the user visits is converted from HTTP to HTTPS. That requires resources, so we had to monetize and the only way to monetize across all those sites is for us to create a web toolbar. It sits on top of the page of the browser.

The top 90 pixels of the browser is our Web toolbar and that is where we display our advertising. It follows you wherever you go. We put one advertisement per page. If we encrypt 2 billion pages for our users, that also means that we serve 2 billion ads.

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of your inventory is monetized today?

David Gorodyansky: We monetize all of it, but some of it is monetized at low rates and some of it is monetized at high rates.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of rates do you see?

David Gorodyansky: People who want to target specifically can pay a $20 CPM. People who do not care can pay a 40 cent CPM. The rates go across the board, but we are able to sell the entire network.

Sramana Mitra: When did you start generating revenue?

David Gorodyansky: We started generating revenue in 2008. We are growing by about 200% year over year. Our first fully profitable year was 2009 followed by 2010. Today we have earned more than $5 million in revenue and the company is profitable.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Connecting The Censored Internet: AnchorFree CEO David Gorodyansky, Mountain View, CA
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