• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, January 26, 2016

The rise of native advertising has brought with it the proliferation of third-party native ad platforms and providers. That, in turn, created a niche for a new company called Tiller, which specializes in helping publishers manage their relationships with native ad partners and optimize their placement of native ads.

Tiller, which came out of beta this week, arose last year in response to publishers moving away from exclusive deals with third-party native ad platforms, which they found too limiting, according to co-founder and CEO Stephen Gill.

“Our goal is to help the publishers take back control, by giving them the tools to maximize revenues across different platforms. They’ve realized it’s in their interests to mix and match their recommended content relationships based on factors like device types, time of day, geographic location, and other attributes,” he said.

Compatible with branded content partners like Outbrain, Taboola, AdSense, AOL's Gravity, and Yahoo, Tiller uses machine learning to target, serve, measure, test and optimize native ad placements, according to Gill.

The service brings these functions together in a single dashboard that plugs into their content management system, allowing publishers to manage the process without the need for new code.

Tiller is launching with over 100 publishers already signed up.

One publisher representative, Chris Mayland, vice-president of consumer markets at Encyclopedia Britannica, said the iconic publishing brand is using Tiller to ensure that its various ad formats are compatible across different regions and partners. “Because we have a global audience we need to make sure whatever ad placements we put on the pages are 100% fillable in different markets,” he said.

Last year ,BI Intelligence forecast that total spending on native advertising will grow from $7.9 billion in 2014 to $21 billion in 2018, and the category is currently enjoying renewed interest from marketers due to growing concern about ad blocking and viewability for traditional display and video ads.