iMedia Connection - ad:tech blog

Last week I wrote about how we got started. This is a continuation of our story:
It's 2008 and still relatively early in the life of our company.
We've kept our burn in check so far. I feel in my gut that we have to find a way into media sales and our engineering driven team needs some sales DNA or else it's going to be tougher to integrate down the road. I want to avoid the oil and water situation.
We bring on our first sales person. She's charismatic, entrepreneurial, and been involved in everything from online gambling to selling brand ads for a green ad network. She begins to work on establishing relationships with Ad Networks and performance advertisers, but struggles with CPG and display advertisers. It's 2008. We try co-reg. It's weak at best and impossible to justify engineering resources. Direct lead and CPA relationships aren't touching what AdSense is bringing us. My gut says we need to stay focused on a few big deals and create deep relationships with a few brands. She doesn't think it will work. Her frustration grows and she soon leaves. The investment of... Read more

Our story is not unfamiliar. A couple of tech guys get together to create a media business. They start quietly, build a fair amount of momentum -- and then doubts set in. The business does not materialize at the pace we’d imagined. Our road map looks challenging. While we are growing and making money, neither of these things are happening quickly enough. Doubt is a dark place for anyone, but it’s especially disturbing for an entrepreneur. Our plan was simple: get to two million US unique visitors, and sell 40% of our US inventory at a $12CPM.
Ten months after we started, my fears were killing me. I had previously told myself that it would be the fear of failure that would keep me focused and ultimately see me through. But, never before had my body broken out in raspberry patches along my rib cage - our business was taking longer to develop, and the symptoms were taking a toll on my health
As they say, nothing ruins a good story like real data.
Now, five years later, Quantcast lists us as a top 50 website. We get 42 million unique visitors per month. Thank goodness for Adsense. Our business is... Read more