Helping Publishers Monetize Premium Ad Inventory: isocket CEO John Ramey (Part 7)

Sramana: You have a good thesis on solving the challenges of premium ad inventory monetization. It won’t work for everybody, but it will work for a lot of publishers.

John Ramey: We are not going to solve it for everyone. We have expanded the pool from 1,000 publishers to 50,000. You no longer have to be in the top 200 to at least get a shot. If you think of the inventory in the world in two buckets, then you have direct premium and remnant. There is an infinite supply of crap.

Sramana: I absolutely agree with your strategy. If you want to sell premium through an automated mechanism, you must be able to guarantee to the advertisers that the inventory you bring to the table has quality assurance on it.

John Ramey: Absolutely. “Guarantee” not only means that it is good inventory, but also that it is available. A lot of brand advertisers cannot get enough of the premium budget. They can’t get their reach target. They know they can go to TV, spend a specific amount of money, and reach a specific number of people. When they go to websites, they cannot spend enough money because an ad network is fundamentally run on a best-effort basis.

If you go directly to Mashable and ask to buy 10 million impressions in December, and they shake your hand and commit, that is a guaranteed binding deal. That is one of the reasons advertisers will pay five times more per CPM for that type of inventory. That is what we enable. Every single campaign that is run through our system is a guaranteed campaign.

Sramana: How can 1M/1M entrepreneurs work with you? One segment has a lot of impressions in the lifestyle area.

John Ramey: Publishers that meet the prerequisites will find us very easy to work with. There are no upfront costs, and there are no opportunity costs because you can continue to run whatever you want to run today. The hard part is making sure that it is worth the time of the publisher to do direct sales. If they are already doing direct sales, then it is a no-brainer.

If they are an advertiser, there is a lot of value for potential entrepreneurs. Advertising online can be nebulous and ambiguous. A lot of people enjoy the simplicity of point-and-shoot advertising. Let’s say for example that you are developing an iPhone game but you don’t have a $50,000- a-month budget. You can spend $500 on an ad network very quickly without great results, or you can go to a targeted website and buy the ad for a month. Those return rates are great. We have seen them as high as 5%. That is unheard of.

Sramana: Do you have a presence in mobile?

John Ramey: Only via the web browser in the phone. We do not do in-application placement. Frankly, there is no meaningful advertiser demand for it. There are no large budgets being put into mobile deals. I think that will take longer than people anticipate.

Sramana: We have very nice game developers, but they do not have hundreds of millions of impressions. They have good audiences but no way to monetize them.

John Ramey: We hear a dozen times a week from mobile publishers that want to sell their inventory. We know that 86% of mobile inventory goes unsold. We only get one inquiry a month from advertisers that want to place ads.

Sramana: Game developers want to acquire customers efficiently. They have no way of acquiring those customers through this model, either. That problem is on both sides.

John Ramey: That is the hottest segment of mobile advertiser demand. That is where they are also advertising online and doing well. We power a lot of iPhone app review sites.

Sramana: The education sector is also working very hard to acquire customers efficiently.

John Ramey: We have advertisers acquiring customers very well in this space. The good news is that it does not have to be a publisher about education, it just has to be a topic that someone wants to be educated on. AppSumo might do a course about programming and advertise on a programming website.

Sramana: The K-12 segment has strong demand here.

John Ramey: One of our people here is a full-time concierge for advertisers. If you are spending $1,000 a month you can tell us what your product is and what audience you are trying to reach. We will help you run that campaign free. One of the ways that we have been growing is by finding publishers for our super niche advertisers. We can get those publishers running a campaign 20 minutes later.

Sramana: I love this story. I look forward to following your continued success.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Helping Publishers Monetize Premium Ad Inventory: isocket CEO John Ramey
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