Glad that appreciated the work that we put into the frontend execution of ADSDAQ. We definitely saw a lot of room for improvement for user experience in online advertising products. (I am a big fan of the book Designing for Interaction… that you have on your coffee table!)

A lot of publishers get twisted out of shape about fill rate, so I’d like to try to explain our system a bit more.

1- The publisher sets their CPM price with ADSDAQ to ensure that all impressions filled by ADSDAQ make them more than they could get elsewhere.

2- The publisher provides a backup tag of their best paying other network. When ADSDAQ can’t fill the impression received, we pass it to the backup tag provided.

The result of this is that any impressions filled by ADSDAQ are by definition additional incremental revenue for the publisher because the make the same as they always did before for any impressions that ADSDAQ does not fill.

Take the example: site has 100K monthly impressions that are making $1 CPM from AdSense (Making $100/mo.). Publisher asks ADSDAQ for $2 CPM and gives AdSense tag as their backup tag.

ADSDAQ fills 20% of the 100K impressions. This results in 20K x $2CPM=$40. AdSense still pays 80K x $1CPM=$80.

The publisher gets paid $120 (rather than the previous months $100) .

The point I’m trying to make here is that even with fill rates in the 15-20% range, the publisher ends up making more revenue than they did previously.

And finally, since ADSDAQ does a real-time contextual scan of every page that we receive an impression from, we can sell publishers’ inventory in “buckets” of categories directly to agencies and advertisers. That allows us to sell the inventory for more, and that allows us to pay the publishers more than what they get paid in other systems.

Hope this helps to explain why we think our idea is not a boo hoo :)