RubiconProject – Too little too late?
December 13th, 2007 by Mike Reining Read more about Make MoneyWe were one of the first publishers to get a chance to try the RubiconProject and we were VERY excited about the opportunity to significantly increase our passive income by using a third party software to optimize how much money we could make from ad networks such as Google AdSense.
The ideal is fantastic! Never before has it been so easy for a publisher to just plug in a piece of code and to automatically let it rotate ads from different ad networks. The folks at RubiconProject have made it so easy that you do not even need to sign-up for the different ad networks. This is a publishers dream!
However, when you get to take a look at the results, one thing very quickly becomes clear. Google AdSense is king! The earnings we received from Google's network vs. any other networks were WAY higher. We are not talking about a small difference here. Our eCPM from Google AdSense vs. any other network was about 20 times bigger!
Perhaps we did not give RubiconProject a try for long enough but I am just skeptical that with more testing they can close a gap this wide. The product ROCKS and it may well work well for some publishers that have different content but for us Google AdSense is king.
It is also a bit scarry. As more advertisers choose Google AdSense and more publishers choose Google AdSense they are creating a virtual cycle that will be hard to beat. Google AdSense is one powerful network!
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About the Author
Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype.
Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.
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Vishen Lakhiani
Really, that is interesting. G came in third for eCPM behind eType and CPX of all networks. That is a little strange in itself.
I am going to to test it for a little longer and see what happens. I do like the side by side analytics though.
We had a chance to test RubiconProject and tested for a couple of days. Basically the results show this is a bad idea. You can do much better by just sticking to adsense, or CPX, or valueclick, rather than show those shopzilla ads that you may not get anything from. Don't say optimize, you can let adsense put random ads there and you can get even better revenues.