My day job, and why I have ads on my site

This will be the only place you'll see me write anything about my day job, because I'm pretty careful about not writing about people or happenings in the workplace, plus I'm bound by non-disclosure agreements and such. Unless it's just a funny story of something that happened at the office or something.

But you'll notice I've added some advertising to my site. Part of this is due to the popularity of the site since adding my Blackjack 2 article series, and partly because of where I'm working now.

On Monday February 4th, I was hired as a software engineer for The Rubicon Project and all I'm willing to say is that I'm part of the team working on scalability and reliability.

In a nutshell, The Rubicon Project works on your behalf with numerous ad agencies to let you put various ads on your site with far less manual work on your part than before. Before The Rubicon Project came around, if you wanted ads on your site, you had to go sign up with Google, Yahoo, ValueClick, AdBrite, and others, and then manually work at rotating your ads based on performance, cost per click (CPC), cost per thousand impressions (CPM), and so on, and it was a very arduous task to check all of your reports every month from every provider, plus getting a handful of checks at the end of the month for a few dollars here, a few dollars there, or having to wait for a few months for an ad agency to pay if they had a minimum payout level to reach before they paid you.

The problem from the advertising agency's point of view is that as a web site publisher, you can only send them so much information about what kind of ads to serve up, and The Rubicon Project will work with you to figure out what sort of information to send to the ad agencies so they can give you advertisements that are more focused on the demographic you're trying to reach. Also, The Rubicon Project will let you adjust the 'weight' of the advertisements based on who you want to reach, and those slider adjustments can even be done at the country level so you can push Shopzilla very heavily to Canadian viewers, or Google at American viewers, or a latin agency to cater ads to users who come from Latin America, and so on

it's a very slick system, and I wish I could tell you some of the clients we have signing up -- big names in the Web 2.0 world! There are a few testimonials on the site that you can read. The beta users who signed up have seen up to 300% increase in ad revenues because of the Rubicon system.

And since I'm helping develop it, I added The Rubicon Project ad tags to my own site to get familiar with the process. It's not like I *need* to run ads to support my site, but hey, every little bit helps. ;o)