PLYmedia is offering adk2, a "free" ad server for long-tail publishers. Here Avishay Raviv, COO and President at PLYmedia, gives an overview of the product and how the company intends to take on established players, DoubleClick and OpenX, in the long tail publisher market.

Can you give some overview on the PLYmedia offering?

To address the needs of millions of publishers in the $9 billion long tail global publisher ad market, PLYmedia developed adk2 – a free ad serving solution.

This ad server enables international traffic monetization and revenue optimization regardless of the country from where the traffic originates. The adk2 publisher ad server facilitates video ad serving since video ads provide, in general, higher eCPMs and therefore generate greater revenue. Every publisher can be up and running with adk2 in less than 15 minutes. It’s easy and intuitive. adk2 offers comprehensive yield optimization across data sources, ad units and traffic sources.

But more than everything else, adk2 allows publishers to maintain complete control of all their activities. Our solution includes an actionable analytics dashboard where publishers can easily find comprehensive decision making tools.

You say your ad server is completely free to use. Aren’t there existing free server solutions on the market?

“Free” is a dangerous marketing term within the online advertising world nowadays. Currently there are several “free” offerings such as Ad Rotator or OpenX OnRamp but usually, for those solutions, “free” means limited. Our adk2 publisher ad server was built to be efficient and easy to use with all of its functionality for free.

If everything is free how is PLYmedia making money?

PLYmedia is a streamlined organization. We are lean and currently profitable. Our mission is simple: We built a very intuitive and efficient ecosystem where publishers get totally free services for their traffic. This ecosystem is a unique infrastructure which serves impressions with almost zero serving costs. PLYmedia takes a small fee from the advertiser side of the ecosystem.

Publishers are well served by existing “free” ad server solutions like OpenX & DoubleClick. How are you standing out from competitors?

You are right. OpenX and DoubleClick and others offer ad server solutions, but at a certain point, the service offered by them isn’t free anymore. At PLYmedia, we’re committed to being 100% free for publishers.

The solutions you mentioned are designed for large publishers and require a very solid IT investment and knowledge from the publishers. The adk2 publisher ad server is a solution built for mid and long tail publishers. Everyone can use it. A blogger with two websites that needs a simple rotation can use adk2. Moreover, other ad serving solutions on the market are not enhanced for increasing revenues from international traffic.

Is PLYmedia looking at the longtail publisher market? Is this million-strong publisher your sweet spot?

Yes. At PLYmedia, we know that there are more than 1 million online publishers generating between $100 and $10,000 per month from ads on their websites. Those are the long tail global publishers and they don’t have an ad serving solution built for their needs. Our free web-based ad server, adk2, is the solution for those publisher partners that need an easy but professional solution.

PLYmedia is looking to help pubs monetise international traffic. Can you explain how you're going to do this?

We are. But let’s try to understand what the main needs of a publisher are. They need an ad server solution in order to increase revenue in the easiest technical environment. International traffic monetization is the X-Factor alongside video and ad optimization in order to generate ever-more revenue. Let’s not forget that even in the US market, many leading websites are generating more than 60% of their traffic internationally. And outside the US, this proportion is even greater. International traffic monetization is one of the most important keys to success. Via adk2, our partners are able to double their eCPM and therefore, their revenues, because we understand how to monetize international traffic.

Aren’t SSPs already doing this? What’s PlyMedia going to do different?

Currently there are 3 main SSPs: Admeld, Pubmatic and Rubicon. Those providers serve together less than 2000 of the largest publishers who all have their own IT teams ready to support ad serving. We target the publishers left aside by those SSPs because of their operational size. Today, more than 2000 publishers already use our platforms.

How will you be selling this inventory? Direct sales? Or will you integrate with DSPs, Trading Desks and ad nets? Will there be a PLYmedia international ad exchange?

We do have a direct sales force targeting video ads with pretty high eCPM. PLYmedia plans to launch an ad exchange which will provide a completely transparent bidding process for our advertisers and hence significantly increase the CPM of our publishers.

And to conclude, you will hear about RTB from us very soon.