State o\ue001 the Market.................................................................................................................1 The Flight to Transparency and The Importance o\ue001 Audience......................................2 A Maturing Industry................................................................................................................2 A New Class o\ue001 Inventory is Emerging............................................................................... 5 Introducing Secondary Premium Inventory...................................................................... 6 New Inventory Warrants Better Sales Channel Management...................................... 8 Audience Extension............................................................................................................... 10 Audience Representation.................................................................................................... 11 What We\u2019ve Seen in 2009 So Far....................................................................................... 12 Thoughts \ue001or the Future....................................................................................................... 13 Footnote Index....................................................................................................................... 16

What a di\ue001\ue001erence two years makes. When the Rubicon Project launched in
2007, the ad network marketplace was in the midst o\ue001 a dramatic growth spurt.
Networks were cropping up around an in\ue000nite number o\ue001 audiences (women-
centric, sports-centric, etc.), sales models (cost-per-action, cost-per-click, etc.)
and o\ue001\ue001ering various kinds o\ue001 targeting (behavioral, contextual, etc.). These 300
networks \ue001ul\ue000lled a very speci\ue000c need back then: to help publishers sell all the
inventory they couldn\u2019t sell on their own, and sell it \ue001ast.

Un\ue001ortunately, there was a great deal o\ue001 con\ue001usion amidst much o\ue001 that ad
network growth. At the time, according to a Collective Media survey, more than
62% o\ue001 advertisers said there were \u201ctoo many ad networks.\u201d1 And with all the
options available, publishers and advertisers were hard pressed to \ue000gure out
which networks to collaborate with. What made one contextual network better
than its rival? How could two networks that were targeting the same niche be
promising such wildly di\ue001\ue001erent minimum CPMs?

That, o\ue001 course, sparked the ad network backlash o\ue001 2008. High-pro\ue000le publishers
like Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and Forbes publicly denounced ad
networks; Wenda Harris Millard and Jim Span\ue001eller\u2019s remarks made headlines \u2014
not just because they were seasoned digital media executives \u2014 but because they
actually vocalized the \ue001rustrations that thousands o\ue001 smaller, less-infuential