AdBrite

» see adbrite.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Three words in the corner of a banner, set small and usually gray. Your Ad Here. On most networks that phrase was decoration for an empty slot. On AdBrite it was a link, and clicking it took you to a page that told you what a week of that specific site's attention cost, in dollars, right then.

Philip Kaplan started it in 2002 as Marketbanker.com with Gidon Wise, and the name changed to AdBrite in 2004. Kaplan already had a reputation from FuckedCompany, the site he ran during the dot-com collapse that kept a running scoreboard of failing startups, which is a strange background for someone who then spent a decade selling ads on the same web. Sequoia Capital and DAG Ventures put in a total of around forty million dollars over the years that followed.

The network grew past a hundred and sixty million American unique visitors a month at its height. Around 2008 it repositioned from an ad network into an ad exchange, adding site-level transparency and video, which put it in a market where the other names were Google and a small number of companies with more money than it had. It sent an email to publishers and advertisers on 28 January 2013 saying it would cease operations on 1 February. All twenty-six employees went. SiteScout bought the intellectual property in June for an undisclosed sum.

What made AdBrite legible from anywhere, including from Turkey with no account and no intention of buying anything, is that it published prices. Advertising on the web was otherwise a thing that happened behind a login, negotiated by people who never told you the number. AdBrite bolted the number to the page. You could sit on a slow connection in Ankara and find out exactly what somebody thought a stranger's attention was worth on a Tuesday.

~ the dossier ~

~ what the link in the corner did ~

Self-serve was the entire pitch and it cut in both directions. A publisher with a small site could not get a salesperson from an agency to return an email, and an advertiser with two hundred dollars could not buy anything from one either. AdBrite let each of them skip the other side of that conversation. The publisher set a price and the advertiser paid it, and the creative went into a review queue before it hit the page.

The review queue is the part people forget. Because anybody could buy, somebody had to look, and the network carried a running tension between letting a small site earn and keeping the ads on it from being garbage. That tension is what eventually pushed the whole industry toward exchanges and automated bidding, where the buying decision is made per impression by machines and nobody publishes a rate card at all.

~ when the buyer walked ~

The 2012 story is a company doing everything the playbook says. New executives came in, the product was repositioned around the exchange, and the whole thing was put up for sale. Chief executive Hardeep Bindra's account afterward was that the talks fell through a couple of weeks before the end, which in a business running on secured debt means the lenders decide what happens next, and they decided to stop.

An independent exchange in 2013 was selling access to inventory that Google could reach through its own stack at lower cost, to buyers who were already inside that stack. Forty million dollars of venture funding bought eleven years and a hundred and sixty million monthly uniques, and none of it bought a reason for anyone to pay for the company rather than wait a month and hire the people.

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