Rubicon Project

Seems like everyone is checking out the Rubicon Project these days. I have been using it since, well everyone started checking out the service (see graph).

They recently raised 6M 21M (link) from Clearstone Venture Partners the Mayfield Fund and have done some work with the great folks over at Square 1 Bank.

The basic premise of the Rubicon Project is to aggregate all the ad networks out there, serving up to you, dear website owner, the ads that are making you the most money. This can be done with serving up the ads that are the most per click with that added data on if you visitors are actually clicking on them. I was excited signing up. After two months of using it, I am a little less excited, but would still recommend it to friends. When I showed it to my friend Dave Taylor his response was “I don’t want to make mad cash, I want to make real cash.” Perhaps their tagline needs some work, but here is my experience:

Really cool things about it:

• Interface is fantastic
• Easy setup
• It doesn’t slow down the site load time (very often at least)
• The report graphs are great. Tasteful animation and great interaction.
• Payoff is fantastic. I made more with a test ad on startupweekend.com (look on the lower right of the sidebar) than I did with just Google Adwords in 4 months.

Things that are weird:

• This blog does not have it because they require a legal statement that I won’t post porn. Startup Weekend was approved without such provisions. Is it easy for me to post that TOS page? Yes, but that would be a silly thing to have to do. Look at the archives or put it in your TOU.
• They might be throttling. Even though I had adwords on the same page in the same spot, I made 4x with the Rubicon Project. Perhaps they are trying to make everyone happy, perhaps they are just better at serving the ads up.
• Only a few ad sizes are supported.
• Lots of features still need to be fleshed out. I would love to have the tools they show us (like rating ad networks) actually work, instead of being dead links.

Anyone using it? What are your experiences?