Thought Leaders in Big Data: PubMatic CTO Anand Das and VP Engineering Sri Gopalsamy (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I want to ask you a specific question about the crossover between media and e-commerce. Let’s take the example of Mail Online for instance. This is a very big lifestyle publisher. Are you familiar with them?

Sri Gopalsamy: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: This is a big lifestyle site. They have hundreds of millions of users. I would say that the biggest category where they would be able to monetize is in lifestyle. I would say Vogue would fall into this category. In general, lifestyle media has a lot of impressions out there. There’s a huge inventory of impressions that is lifestyle content. Do you do anything to tie lifestyle content directly into commerce?

Anand Das: It depends upon the publishers and their business policies. We do help them do that. We don’t do it on their behalf, but we do integrate into their systems that they use to actually give them insights that will allow them to bucket users into interesting categories. The other thing is whenever you deal with e-commerce, the challenge for any company which does sales and ads is cannibalization. Is ad cannibalizing their monetization in other areas because it might so happen that users intended to do something and the ad might actually change the course of action that the user takes. What we do out there is integrate with their existing systems to pull in data. Along with that, we correlate with our data and provide them a holistic view of where the nuggets of revenue are and help them monetize that.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a different use case. I was talking about straight publishers. The closest example that I would say is probably affiliate models. In the bulk of your publisher clients, most likely, you’re charging on CP and bases right?

Sri Gopalsamy: Right.

Sramana Mitra: If you look at the whole affiliate marketing world, it’s very much a CPA basis marketing. One of my thesis actually is, in general, media companies are struggling with monetization especially lifestyle media. At some level, a close tie-in between these lifestyle media companies and straight up e-commerce through more of a CPA kind of model would monetize better for them, but we don’t see a lot of that happening yet.

Sri Gopalsamy: I got your use case. We are not in that space, but there are a few companies in that area which actually use content and refer the users based on their interest and what they’re reading to e-commerce websites and basically get paid on clicks or moving the users from their website to related content on an e-commerce website. I think there is a good amount of revenue to be made out there. It depends upon the publisher. That’s an area that people are optimizing today. Also, content syndication is another area wherein you can, based on the content on your website, refer to to another partner website to increase somebody else’s user pool thereby, sharing revenues from ads or other mechanisms that the other website is making. You’re right about that part.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: PubMatic CTO Anand Das and VP Engineering Sri Gopalsamy
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