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Yieldbot 2014 Review by the Numbers

Posted December 22nd, 2014 by Jonathan Mendez in   |   Comments.

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It’s been an amazing 2014 at Yieldbot. Since one of our core values is being data driven, I am going to share some of our amazing internal data.

Everything we are and we accomplish starts with the team. In 2014 our team grew from 29 to 62 people. We opened 2 new offices (Chicago and Bentonville) and moved into 2 larger offices in Portland and New York City.

Yieldbot is webscale. In 2014 our technology collected and processed consumer activity on 8 billion consumer sessions across almost 400 premium publisher desktop and mobile websites. This equated to over 23 billion page-views of first party data and accounting for ad slots, over 50 billion real-time decisions. We do not measure “unique visitors” since we are a “cookieless” technology but on an aggregate level we likely have one of the largest footprints in digital advertising. Certainly we have one of the largest in premium content and the largest collection and use of first-party publisher data for monetization. Woohooo!

On the advertising side we ran over 1500 campaigns this year, many of which are “always-on.” Over 240,000 creative variations ran on Yieldbot in 2014 producing a platform wide CTR of .35%. It was not unusual to see desktop campaigns over .75% CTR or higher and mobile campaigns at 3% CTR. Reminder – these are display ads in IAB standard units.

For 2014 our top-line revenue grew 6.5X after growing 29x last year. Our gross profit grew over 14X this year after growing 46X last year. Our first 3 years of revenue compares almost identically to RocketFuel, who ended up being the #1 fastest growing technology company in the D&T; Fast 500 its first year of eligibility. It’s possible we are the fastest growing company in advertising technology right now and despite one-time costs associated with two office moves, December 2014 will be our first month of EBITDA profitability.

Our growth is fueled entirely by the performance of the media. We sell on a performance basis – 70% of our campaigns are run on a Cost-Per-Click (CPC) model. Our success is measured most on performance of the audiences we are helping drive to the marketer’s own sites and digital experiences. In that regard, we regularly beat the performance of paid search and crush other display technologies for our clients (ask [email protected] for the case studies). Also, 2014 was our first full year of offering mobile ads. 25% of our revenue in 2014 was from mobile. In Q4 it is 33% of our revenue. Mobile is growing fast.

Yieldbot will continue to be guided by the fundamental truth that we can never be successful unless our publishers are. Our commitment to publishers and more specifically to the people that consume their media must be forefront in our minds. Everything flows from that.

2014 was a banner year for our publishers. For our largest publishing partner, a media titan, we are their single largest partners - digital or print. They will generate over $6M from Yieldbot for 2014. Many other publishers are in the million-dollar club and many others will be soon as quarter-over-quarter revenue to publishers is growing fast.

A large part of our publisher success is that we delivered CPMs 2-4X what publishers are getting from ad exchanges or other partners such as SSPs. Since the backbone of our tech is machine learning (or as I like to say machine “earning”) our most successful publishers are the ones our technology has been on the longest. They are getting CPM in the $5-$10 range. This is on desktop and mobile. Maybe our best story of the year is a large site with 22M unique visitors a month that had been a huge Google partner but is now getting RPM from Yieldbot as high as 11X Google and for the first time ever has a partner delivering more total monthly revenue than Google. Cha-ching!

One other amazing thing happened on the publisher side of our business this year. Our success with their first-party data lead to publishers asking to use our technology to serve their own direct-sold campaigns and creation of a service model for Yieldbot. These publishers, some of the largest on the web, are now delivering CTR performance 5X what they were delivering running campaigns with data from their DMP and using their Ad Server waterfall to decision. In addition, they are delivering back-end metrics that allow them to compete for budgets going to Facebook and Google. Ask [email protected] for the case studies.

We made other incredible advances with our technology this year as well. We increased our lead in understanding real-time consumer activity with major efforts around real-time data streaming and the quality of our intent scoring and optimization decisions. We also helped a number of our publishers with issues around fraudulent traffic (at no charge) since we have our own systems to validate visitors. As a performance technology the onus/cost is on us to ensure we are serving to quality traffic.

We did it all in a fully transparent manner, building trust with our direct relationships at the agencies and with publishers. If publishers want to know their highest RPM pages by referrer source for Monday mornings we are happy that we can provide that data. If advertisers want to know what creative headline drove the highest conversion rate in the afternoon we are happy that we can provide that data. What we’re most proud of is that not only have we built a business that can provide this deep level of learning, but also by the time we have that data it is already being acted upon by our tech to improve business results.

2014 was the year Yieldbot got on the map and truly started blowing people’s minds with our technology and our results. For our company it was clearly “the end of the beginning.” Next year, it will not be enough to simply outperform our competitors. We are focused on transforming an entire industry so that advertisers, publishers and consumers all receive the benefits of relevance. Namely, increasing the value of digital media for every participant. We are excited for 2015 and thankful to everyone that helped us get this far in our journey.

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