Invite Media

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

~ the obit ~

Google announced it on the DoubleClick advertiser blog on Thursday 3 June 2010, under the headline "Investing in Exchange Bidding". The body opened by announcing it had "acquired Invite Media, an innovative start-up based in New York and Philadelphia". The price was not in the post. It came out six days later in All Things Digital, at $81 million.

Invite Media had been founded in April 2007 by four people, Nathaniel Turner, Zachary Weinberg, Scott Becker and Michael Provenzano. Turner and Weinberg had gone through Wharton's undergraduate economics program together. The product was called Bid Manager, and what it did was collapse several ad exchanges into one buying screen so that an agency could bid on individual impressions in real time without logging into a different system for each exchange.

Google had closed its AdMob purchase a week earlier, and the reaction to this one was sharp. John M. Simpson of Consumer Watchdog put it as a question: "The ink is hardly dry on Google's questionable AdMob acquisition, and the Internet giant is forging ahead with an insatiable appetite for more. When is enough, enough?" Google said publicly that it would not hand its own DoubleClick Ad Exchange an advantage inside the tool, and that Invite would keep running as its own thing. For roughly two years it did.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the eighty-one million became ~

Turner and Weinberg stayed at Google about two years as product managers, then left and started Flatiron Health in 2012, which built software for cancer clinics. Roche bought that one in 2018 for $1.9 billion. The ad exchange bidder that made their names sold for about a twentieth of what came next.

~ the name goes ~

On 19 September 2012 the same DoubleClick blog explained what had happened to the thing it bought: Google had acquired the Invite Media demand-side platform in 2010 and had since completely rebuilt the platform. The rebuilt version was DoubleClick Bid Manager. It had been in beta over that summer and was going out to all customers in October. Google claimed the new infrastructure surfaced sixteen percent more inventory simply by cutting latency between itself and the exchanges.

October 2012 is where the name stops. Bid Manager kept the lineage and lost it again on 24 July 2018, when every DoubleClick product was renamed and it became Display & Video 360. The Internet Archive first captured invitemedia.com in August 2007 and was still pulling 404s off it in 2023. Today there is no DNS record left to answer.

~ the funny part ~

Almost nobody was ever a user of this product. Its customers were media buyers inside agencies, and they are the only people who ever typed the address into a browser. The rest of us were the inventory.

By 2010 I was on TTNet broadband reading Turkish news sites and forums like everyone I knew, and the banner slots on pages like those were beginning to be sold at auction in the fraction of a second between the click and the page drawing. That machinery had to be built by somebody, and a four-person startup out of Philadelphia built an early piece of it and was absorbed before most of the people it billed against had heard the phrase real-time bidding.

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