• Los Angeles Times, Tuesday, February 19, 2008 11 AM

Online advertising might be more measurable than other media, but it isn't as efficient as it could be, says Frank Addante, the 31-year-old founder of the Rubicon Project, a Silicon Valley startup. It's estimated that Web sites only sell about 20 percent of their ad space directly to advertisers. Ad networks handle the other 80 percent, but they often do a poor job of matching advertisers' products and services to the Web pages in their networks.

That's where Rubicon comes in. Through complicated,though unexplained math, Rubicon compares ad networks in real-time, matching the network with the most relevant ads to a given publisher. Web sites use the service to receive the ads that pay best and are most likely to be clicked on.

Rubicon is essentially trying to bring AdWords-like relevancy and efficiency to the highly competitive ad network market.

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