Rubicon Project Review

Online advertising was something that used to really get under my skin. Why on earth would I want to see blinky flashy ads on web sites when all I want to do is read some content? The first plugin I'd install with Firefox on any computer was Adblock Plus.

After hearing what The Rubicon Project was all about, I immediately saw a business plan that couldn't fail. I'd tried AdSense on my site in the past, as well as various linked ads with LinkShare and others. I even had a guy contact me out of the blue offering to buy advertising space on my site. I made about $0.02-$0.46 per day with the advertising, with a peak of $0.75 on one day, which was extremely lame. A month of effort barely bought me a ticket to a movie or covered my monthly Napster subscription. Bleh.

The Rubicon Project changed all that.

I tried their ad tags here at iandouglas.com, then my wife got interested and we tried them on her site too (with her own account), so of course it was a no-brainer when I launched blackjack2.info that I'd include Rubicon ads.

The net result over the past couple of months since their Public Beta launch?

When I first added the tags to my site, I started out lower than my original daily take, which discouraged me, and I debated going back to managing everything myself. But optimizing ad networks based on your traffic takes a few days for the system to analyze, so I decided to stick it out, because Rubicon learns over time. As of this writing, they've served about 23.5 BILLION ads, and every ad they serve helps them learn and optimize even more efficiently, both over all and for just my individual site.

Between the public beta launch in April and yesterday, my average CPM jumped by 170%. I only need about $3.60 per day just to cover my hosting fees, and having my daily revenue increase by over 306% means I'm pretty much at my break-even point.

Some people will read this and think "Meh, a measly $4/day, are you kidding?" Well, running iandouglas.com was never about making enough money to quit my job and blog full time, but making enough money on it to at least cover my costs for hosting makes me happy! I'm still doing a lot more SEO work on my sites to get a little more traffic, and just let Rubicon work out the details of making me more money with the increased traffic. Rubicon *has* customers who make a full-time living just from their ads.

Stop reading, go sign up for Rubicon Project ad tags, and make some "mad cash" today!

In the spirit of Full Disclosure:

This review is an honest-and-true account of my own recent dealings with online advertising. To be completely open about it, I'm currently an employee at The Rubicon Project as the lead engineer on core statistics and analytics data which helps our math geniuses do what they do best -- make people "mad cash" with optimization. I was not asked or encouraged to write this review.

Despite being an employee, I use the *exact* same interface that any other person uses when they sign up, and I pay Rubicon the same 10% of the managed advertising they bring to my site. I get no discounts, I have absolutely no special treatment on my sites or ads, I use the same ad networks as everyone else that signs up, I have no hidden extras, my setup is as vanilla as they come.

On average, Rubicon Project clients see between 30% and 300% revenue increases. And we're hiring. Come join the fun!