Monumetric

Nathan Putnam started a social marketing agency in 2012 while in grad school, as part of an entrepreneurship class graded on the revenue it generated. The agency did well in its early years, with the second year bringing in a little over a quarter of a million dollars. Then Facebook began changing its algorithm, profit margins shrank, and the team grew uneasy about depending on ad spend. Through influencer outreach, they learned that their publisher clients did not need more traffic. Their real problem was monetizing the traffic they already had.

The founders' first major relationship came through Six Sisters' Stuff, a lifestyle publisher they already knew. When the team offered to help without charging, they ran several months of R&D and doubled the publisher's earnings. They then ran a private alpha with 13 other publishers before leaving beta. The company built a rev-share model in which Monumetric keeps a portion of revenue and returns roughly 70 to 80% to the publisher. Its core technology connects publishers to multiple ad exchanges in real time so they compete against each other, which pushes up the price of each impression.

The first paying customers came from the agency's existing relationships. Six Sisters' Stuff was the flagship account. The company's early growth came from the 400 publishers who signed up after the beta launch, and it took about six months to build the infrastructure to serve them. By September 2016 it had just over 1,500 publishers. Founder Nathan Putnam also runs the Build Your Blog Conference, which started in 2013 and is held every February. It is a way to build publisher trust and brand presence.

The company's model worked because it addressed a real gap. Publishers were not getting the value of their traffic, and direct revenue sharing removed a layer of intermediaries. The team has also stayed disciplined about testing. They try roughly eight to twenty new ad providers each week, and about 95% of them fail to beat current performance. Putnam describes the process as "nail it and scale it": prototype cheaply in Excel, then have developers automate what works. Revenue grew from $2.4M in 2014 to over $6M in 2015. The business has also been partly dependent on platform changes. Putnam has said that a single algorithm change on a platform like Facebook can force a business to rebuild.

As of September 2016, Monumetric had 41 full-time employees in Farmington, Utah. The company is bootstrapped apart from one convertible note of $100K. Its ad inventory runs through Google's ad exchange, OpenX, and integrations with the five largest agency trading desks. Walmart became one of its largest buyers after its first month on one of these exchanges.