The Rubicon Project Gets $15 Million in a Series B

Sunday, January 27th, 2008

Erick Schonfeld is the Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. He oversees the editorial content of the site, helps to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produces TCTV shows, and writes daily for the blog. He is also the father of three adorable children. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular... → Learn More

picture-191.pngThe Rubicon Project, a meta ad network that helps Websites place and optimize ads from the hundreds of other ad networks out there, closed a $15 million B round just three months after raising a $6 million A round. Hopefully, they didn’t spend it all already. The B round was led by Mayfield. IDG Ventures Asia, Stanford University, the University of California Berkeley, and Clearstone Venture Partners (which led the A round) participated, as did LowerMyBills founder Matt Coffin.

The company is still in beta and is not charging customers yet, but in the past three months it has served up 4 billion ads and generated more than $1 million in revenues for its beta publishers. It claims beta customers are seeing a 30 percent+ increase in ad revenues, and is trying to figure out how much of that it can take as its fee. Ultimately, the Rubicon Project is a middleman in between a Website and another middleman (the ad network) and, finally, the advertiser. The fact that they think there is a business here speaks to the inefficiencies of the online advertising market. Maybe it is time for online advertising exchanges like Microsoft’s AdECN, which is a stock exchange for ads where buyers and sellers deal with each other directly.

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