An auction marketplace named AdBidCentral is launching this week to help advertisers and publishers buy and sell online ad space both in real time and in the future.
The startup's
auction structure bears a resemblance to Right Media, which Yahoo agreed to buy outright for more than $680 million in April, and an ad exchange named AdECN that Microsoft is in the process of
acquiring for an undisclosed sum.
Another established auction site tapping the so-called "long tail" with premium publisher inventory is ContextWeb's ADSDAQ. The two-year-old exchange serves
impressions from more than 350 advertisers, including 12 of the top 15 ad agencies, and 1,000 publishers.
AdBidCentral is no exchange, according to founder and CEO Vivek Veeraraghavan.
"We
consider ourselves a rolling upfront, or a futures marketplace, but not an exchange because that refers to remnant inventory," Veeraraghavan explained. "Our focus is premium display advertising rather
than providing a spot market for remnant inventory."
AdBidCentral, according to Veeraraghavan, has been quietly beta testing for a year, and has been in possession of some 400 million monthly ad
impressions since May. Beta participants included CareerBuilder.com, WhitePages.com, and MyYearBook.com.
By investing in auction-based exchanges, Yahoo and Microsoft have attempted to extend
their online ad networks--thus creating one-stop shops for advertisers facing ever more fragmented audiences online.
Likewise, Veeraraghavan cites online audience fragmentation as the rationale
behind AdBidCentral.
"Think of how fragmented the whole media industry is becoming," he said. "Without a marketplace like ours, the process is friction-full and laden with inefficiencies."
AdBidCentral's marketplace purports to be fully transparent, while its platform handles everything from booking, transacting, flight and reporting in one central location.