cooking up the offense like he's cooking ravioli

Today Right Media announced they were shutting down Direct Media Exchange. The reason I bring this up is because for nearly four years I worked on the team that built DMX. Working at Right Media and getting to build DMX was a great opportunity for me. I learned how to build web applications from some great engineers and learned how to build products from some amazing product folk.

DMX was actually a very useful tool that didn’t really ever catch on as much as it should have. The premise was simple: “put our ad tag on your site and we will find the highest paying ad to serve”. Seems like a dream come true for publishers, and as the publisher of Swap-bot I can confirm that it was with one exception – not everyone was on the Right Media Exchange. We had a really nice tool for handling advertisers/networks that weren’t on the Exchange, but it required manual tweaking for maximum revenue.

I’m not really sad to see DMX get shut down – Yahoo lost my sympathy when they let me and my team go after we did some great work on their “next generation” ad serving platform – but I do miss the early days of DMX. DMX hadn’t been touched for a couple years and was starting to fall apart. Swap-bot had to stop using DMX a couple weeks ago because the ad blocking tool stopped working and highly inappropriate ads were being shown.

I think real time integrations are fueling the next chapter in publisher monetization tools. Once we get all advertisers bidding on all available inventory the publisher really will be able to kill the daisy chain. Once all the supply on the internet is linked to all of the demand on the internet, publisher monetization tools will be little more than reports, ad tags and creative/brand blocking. Once you get this set up once you will never have to go back unless you want to see how large of a check you will be getting at the end of the month. Of course, this also means there will be some pretty exciting tools for advertisers, but I will save that discussion for the future.

I leave you with a video from some of DMX’s brighter days: