• by Tyler Loechner  @mp_tyler, April 8, 2013

OpenX today announced Revenue Intelligence, a service that will provide publishers with a new way to approach how they manage their content. Anke Audenaert, co-founder of JumpTime, which was purchased by OpenX in October 2012, is head of the Revenue Intelligence team. Audenaert spoke with RTM Daily about the new product and said that it's really about "putting the publishers back in the driver's seat." 

However, while the publishers might be sitting in the driver's seat, it's Revenue Intelligence's algorithm that's doing the actual driving.

Audenaert told RTM Daily, "What we are basically introducing is a new suite of services and products that really should help publishers bridge the gap between content on the one hand and advertising…on the other hand." She pointed out that content and advertising are typically dealt with separately, but that OpenX and JumpTime have discovered that it's better to optimize content and advertising together, which she claimed is something that "hasn't really happened before." 

"What [publishers] were really missing was one, unifying metric which [put] content and advertising values together," she said. Audenaert had observed that publishers have never been sure exactly what their content is worth. Now, "…publishers figure out what their space [is] really worth in real-time." 

One way the Revenue Intelligence tool does this is by calculating the "downstream value" of content in real-time. In other words, the tool allows publishers to know what the content and advertising space on the second, third, etc., pages a user might go to are worth. By combining this technology, which came from JumpTime, with OpenX, Audenaert said that publishers can now see the value of pages in a programmatic environment in addition to a direct sales environment.

Revenue Intelligence provides publishers with what Audenaert called "decision support tools," which help editors find out the value of any content on their pages. Another way to think of it is helping publishers promote their own content via automation in order to take the user "further downstream."

Publishers put a piece of code on their Web page and then an algorithm learns user behavior from scratch. If a specific piece of content is not generating clicks, for example, the algorithm learns and bumps it down. Even though the whole thing starts from scratch, Audenaert said that even the learning is in real-time. "[It] takes about half an hour," she claimed.

Publishers might be gaining some control back by bridging the gap between content and advertisements, but it’s the algorithm that’s doing the real-time learning and placement of content. Either way, Revenue Intelligence seems like a unique way for publishers to manage their content. If revenue opportunities really are falling through the crack between content and advertisements, then it's about time a bridge was built between the two.