• by Sara Guaglione , February 20, 2020

Rhombus , an ad platform built around embedded social content on publishers’ sites, is expanding to support embeds from 19 social platforms, allowing publishers to monetize content in a variety of formats.

Previously, Rhombus supported embeds from six social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, SoundCloud, Spotify and YouTube.

Now, Rhombus is adding support to embeds from Reddit, Tik Tok, Vimeo, Anchor, Megaphone, Vimeo, Twitch, Giphy, Gfycat and Imgur.  It works with various publishers, such as Rolling Stone, Chicago Tribune, Variety, Barstool Sports and New York Daily News.

“Although unifying contextual data points from multiple social platforms is a major technological challenge, we’re tackling this critical hurdle head on,” stated Abe Storey, founder-CEO at Rhombus. “Solving this problem empowers advertisers to engage consumers around all types of social conversations in real-time, and at the same time, create new monetization opportunities for publishers.”

Rhombus says more than 36% of articles contain social embeds — whole articles are written around tweets from President Trump, for example. 

Its platform analyzes and classifies over 100,000 social embeds every day, by social platform, keywords, hashtags, accounts, platforms and interest segments. 

The marketplace then allows advertisers to target across contextually relevant social content, using those classifiers.

For publishers, its technology is designed to help monetize social embeds in articles.

Nish Patel, founder-CEO at ClutchPoints, says its sports social media brand for millennials and Gen Z has more than 6.5 million social embed ad calls each month across its network.

“Rhombus’ expanded platform support affords us deeper monetization capabilities that we didn't know previously existed," he stated.

For a company like ClutchPoints, a lot of content is based on social moments, such as what LeBron James posts after an NBA game, Patel told Publishers Daily. With a line of code, ClutchPoints can make additional, incremental revenue through an automated process, and place relevant ads in its articles.

Ads are served around the embed itself. For example, a tweet from James will have an ad around it from an advertiser bidding around LeBron, the NBA, or sports in general, Patel explained. “It’s all about quality of ads for us: good direct deals, and good ads,” he said. 

The most used social embed types to date are from Twitter, Instagram and Youtube, according to Rhombus’ internal data. Audio based embeds from Soundcloud and Spotify have grown the most over the past year.

Rhombus also announced it hired Arton Gjonbalaj as director of brand partnerships.

Within the past month, Rhombus has appointed Jeff Rich as executive vice president of Revenue, Mike Garite as vice president of product and Katie Black as director of publisher development.

Prior to Rhombus, Gjonbalaj was senior account executive of brand partnerships at Imgur. He previously worked at Say Media (acquired by Maven in 2018) and Interactive One.