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Imagine you publish content on the Internet. You monitor your metrics. You know the demographic of your audience. If you offer ad space, you know your cost per impression. But how do you know if your numbers are good? And how do you know if you’re making the most ad money possible?
Those are the questions that sovrn Holdings answers. The company, which was born out of the January 2014 sale of Federated Media to LIN Media, offers a range of online publishing tools that evaluate site traffic, audience demographic, a website’s on-site search capability and more. In addition, they give publishers context, allowing them to view pertinent metrics of competitors and adjust their sites accordingly.
“As a publisher of a website, you know what’s going on with your website,” sovrn CEO Walter Knapp said. “We think publishers need to know how they compare and contrast with their peers, so they can improve and get better."
The Boulder-based company addresses that issue by providing comparative metrics, and so far, publishers have taken notice. About 20,000 publishers belong to the sovrn network, including The Onion, Elite Daily and The Chive. More than 100,000 websites come from that pool of publishers, and according to Knapp, those websites garner a collective 600 million monthly visitors.
$1M in weekly ad revenue
There is money to be made within such volume, and that is another area where sovrn assists publishers.
Publishers can apply to be accepted to sovrn’s free ad platform; sovrn won’t accept hate sites, pornography sites or fraudulent sites that infringe on copyrights or trademarks. The platform works on behalf of publishers to automatically fill ad spots with some of the world’s biggest advertising buyers, including Acxiom, Brandscreen and Yahoo! Ad Exchange.
Essentially, sovrn works to get the best value for publishers’ ad spots, all while taking the work out of publishers’ hands.
“Publishers are really good at creating content; they’re really good at engaging their readership; by themselves, they’re not large enough, nor are their advertising sales people on staff necessarily connected enough, to go sell to the biggest advertisers in the world,” Knapp said. “We sit in the middle and operate that programmatic exchange with the goal of connecting the right marketer to the the right consumer through the best publishing point.”
Knapp said sovrn serves approximately 10,000 ads per second, which generates roughly $1 million worth of weekly revenue for publishers. Every 30 days, publishers get paid, and sovrn retains a percentage from the buyers.
sovrn in other sectors
The sheer number of publishers that already use sovrn speaks to the importance of digital advertising, and programmatic advertising in particular.
In October 2014, eMarketer reported that spending on programmatic display advertising in the U.S. would top $10 billion that year, a growth of 137.1 percent that would account for 45 percent of the US digital display advertising market. Furthermore, the report predicted that programmatic ad spending would double by 2016, ultimately accounting for 63 percent of US digital display ad spending.
Undoubtedly, sovrn plans to take advantage of that reality. Knapp said sovrn has two main goals in 2015 (aside from hosting the year's first Built In Brews!). One goal is to get as many publishers as possible using their platform; a public release in March will help that cause.
The other goal, Knapp said, is to become excellent with the collection, storage, organization, and activation of its data. In fact, data fuels sovrn. As Knapp put it, sovrn “just happens to do programmatic advertising,” hinting that sovrn has the ability to work in the future with a variety of industries.
“I think the sophistication of data and automation is going to touch every aspect of commerce and consumption,” Knapp said. “Programmatic advertising is just the first shoe to drop.”
NOTE: sovrn and Built In Colorado are hosting our next Built In Brews event Thursday at sovrn's offices in Boulder. Get your tickets before they're all gone!
Thanks to our event sponsors: PivotalTracker, HomeAdvisor (hiring!), ComcastVIPER (hiring!), Technical Integrity (hiring!) & SoftLayer
