How does the saying go, “Need is the mother of all inventions?” Well, in our story, innovation was the mother, and need was the thing that slapped us in the face and caused our pivot!
Starting up several years ago, we were a small team of young, aspiring entrepreneurs looking to build the next big content-rich site. With a background in the college music scene, we began to piece together a small syndication network that brought our audience “first looks” at the latest and greatest tracks “cut straight out of a dorm room”. (due to contracts signed, we can’t mention our original blog/syndicate)
Just When You Think You Made It!
About 6 months in, quite a few cases of 5 hour energy shots, a few hundred up-and-coming music artists, and roughly 2 dozen blogger allies — we had ourselves a decently successful site!
Our next problem. How do we start paying the bills…
The first thought we had to monetize – charge the musicians for the “promotion” we gave them, but how could any bootstrapping entrepreneur not empathize with a “starving artist’s” cause? So, we needed to find another way.
Man That Makes You Think
You may think that advertising was a clear “go to” in this scenario, but realistically, we put so much pride into our site as being a trendsetting platform, we just didn’t want to bog it down with irrelevant banners ads. But what if the ads could be cool, targeted, and, dare I say it, add value to our site’s experience?!
Now, just because I said that we had a decently successful site doesn’t mean we’re sitting at the top of comscore 500! Which also meant that the access “big box” urls have to premium demand markets was blindly restricted to us. Our answer, create our own access!
Where There’s a Will There’s a Way!
It was out of our own need to make as much money as possible, while keeping the highest quality of advertisement as possible, that as entrepreneurs we dived (PubPOOLr pun intended, sorry) into the deep end of premium programmatic advertising – determined to find a solution we’d be happy with.
Via really awesome conversations and quite a bit of collaboration amongst industry experts, our small team was able to put together a data driven ad solution that really encompassed the concept of holistic advertising. And yes, it was simple AND gave us high quality, relevant ads for our site.
Well, That Felt Good :)
In a sudden sense of pride, we began to open up access to our ad ops solution for our “syndicate” blogger pals, and when we realized that we could make people more money in a simpler way than they otherwise would – PubPoolr.com was born!
Thus, we made the full nelson transition of being a team of young naive entrepreneurs that started a project out of pure passion, and a few years later culminated it launching an extremely awesome adtech venture forged out of need, hard work and perseverance.
About the Author: This article is written by Chris S of PubPoolr.com