• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, April 2, 2009

A growing number of startups are competing to help Web publishers better manage the sea of ad networks they can now choose from to sell leftover ad impressions.

For a share of earned ad revenue, companies like The Rubicon Project, Pubmatic, and AdMeld factor in pricing data, available inventory, and publisher guidelines to determine which ad network is sent an ad impression -- work that a publisher's sales force would otherwise be required to perform.

"There's about a 70/30 split in the money we generate for publishers," said Michael Barrett, CEO of AdMeld. "70% is revenue lift from the superior management of a publisher's inventory, and 30% comes from the reallocation of resources, which allows publishers to focus on premium sales."

Late last year, AdMeld launched a platform to help publishers maximize revenue from digital ad networks and ad exchanges.

The AdMeld platform, which is emerging from an eight-month beta program, attempts to leverage dynamic pricing and advanced targeting to better route inventory from publishers to generate higher revenue for each ad served.

At the same time, AdMeld brought in Barrett, who had most recently served as EVP and chief revenue officer for News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media.

The Huffington Post has been an AdMeld client since the fall. Since that time, its optimization technology has increased revenues from ad networks at the news site by 200%, according to James Smith, chief revenue officer at The Huffington Post.

The technology enabled The Huffington Post "to refocus our own internal resources on direct sales," said Smith. "And that's our main mission."