Right Media

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

~ the goodbye ~

right media is a grave for something that never had a single user. i was online through the whole of its life and so was anybody reading this, and every one of us passed through it thousands of times without the word ever appearing on a screen. an ad exchange is plumbing. you do not sign up for it, you are the thing moving across it.

michael walrath started it in march 2003, in the part of the advertising business that nobody outside the advertising business could see. the problem was real enough. a publisher sold what it could directly, then handed the leftovers to an ad network, which sold what it could and handed the remainder to another network, and by the fourth hop an impression was worth almost nothing and nobody could say who was holding it.

the right media exchange put all of that in one room. networks bid against each other for the same impression in real time instead of passing it down a line. that idea is now the entire structure of display advertising on the web, and right media is where it first worked at scale.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the six hundred and eighty million ~

yahoo made a strategic investment on 17 october 2006 and announced the full acquisition on 30 april 2007, in a transaction valued at roughly six hundred and eighty million dollars. it closed that july. google had announced its own three point one billion dollar deal for doubleclick two weeks earlier, so the spring of 2007 was the season in which both companies decided that owning the pipes mattered more than owning the pages.

yahoo was arguably first to the right conclusion. it bought a working open exchange while google bought an ad server and had to build the exchange onto it afterward.

~ what yahoo did with it ~

mostly nothing. the consulting arrangement with iponweb, which had built much of the underlying technology, was ended in 2009, and the platform stopped keeping pace from about that point. the executives who had built the business left between 2009 and 2011. google's doubleclick ad exchange and appnexus were funded and staffed for a fight that right media had stopped turning up to.

what followed was not a collapse so much as a slow souring. inventory quality slid while fraud grew faster than anyone's ability to screen it out, and buyers who cared what they were purchasing moved their budgets to exchanges with stricter supply standards. by 2014 the volume clearing through it had been thin for months.

~ the actual end ~

on 9 january 2015 yahoo emailed the sellers who were left to say the exchange would be shut to all non-yahoo networks and publishers, in some cases within the week. what stayed open was yahoo's own display inventory plus a hand-picked set of premium partners, still running under the name yahoo ad exchange. the open marketplace part was simply switched off.

six hundred and eighty million dollars bought the mechanism that display advertising still runs on today, and then let it decay for the last six of its eleven years. the idea went everywhere. the company that proved it out did not go anywhere at all.

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