Ad tech startup Yieldbot raises $5M Series A

Yieldbot helps connect publishers and advertisers to better target display ads

Advertising on the Web is still big business, even as more and more money goes to mobile. Trouble is, a lot of that money goes toward search advertising, instead of display ads. It makes sense: that really is the easiest way to know what someone is interested in seeing. Problem is that Google basically has a strangehold on that market, and they even have been accused of exploiting that power in the past. 

Ad tech startup Yieldbot, which helps connect publishers and advertisers in order to better target their display ads, has raised a $5 million Series A round of funding, the company announced via blog post late last week.

The round was lead by RRE Ventures, who has invested at every stage of the company's development so far. Existing investors New Atlantic Ventures, kbs+ Ventures, Common Angels, Neu Ventures and Board member Cathie Black participated in the round as well.

The company previously raised a $1.2 million seed round, and a $4.2 million Series A. This latest funding brings the total raised to $10.5 million.

New York City-based Yieldbot captures and organizes realtime intent of users on websites. It then makes this information available to advertisers so that they can then go and match offers, as well as ads, at the exact moment consumers are most open to receiving relevant marketing.

It partially does this by allowing advertisers to keyword match their ads to the intent of the user in real-time. Basically, the company is able to find out what a user is attempting to find by tracking their behavior once they get to a Web site.

Here is how the company describes what they do on their website:

"Yieldbot is built to crunch publisher data - lots of it – with the express purpose of understanding ‘why” every landing, click and exit is happening on your site. Our technology captures data and distills it into Intent-based analytics for the people visiting and pages viewed on your site. As a web publisher visitor Intent is arguably the most valuable data about your business. We’ve spent the past two years building a technology for publishers to understand it."

Basically, the service tracks the behavior of users on a website, so that publishers can better target them for ads. And however Yieldbot does it, it seems to be working.

The company was founded in 2010, but it the company says that it is already closing in on 1.5 billion page views a month. That would make it the third largest real-time intent source on the Web, right  behind Google and Yahoo/Bing. Yieldbot already counted media companies like Meredith, Rodale, Remedy Health, BlogHer, BabyCenter, Internet Brands, and many others, as partners.

"It’s still early days. We’re travelling through uncharted territory of first-party big data mixed with real-time decisioning. That’s the way we like. The learning we’ve accumulated over the last three years in this space has been tremendous," the company wrote.

"We’re excited to learn more and keep building something different. More than one marketer told us this past year that Yieldbot is their secret weapon. A year from now we anticipate Yieldbot will not be so secret anymore."

(Image source: https://www.yieldbot.com)