The Secret to Adblade’s Success

by Shawn Hartley on October 29, 2011

I have been seeing more and more of those embedded attention-grabbing advertisements running across top news sites of late.  I recently found out that many of these ads are served up by an online advertising technology company called Adblade.  Adblade’s ads have proliferated across the Web over the last 4 years.  Comscore now reports Adblade as a top 25 Internet property and Quantcast reports that Adblade is reaching over 178 million users a month.  So how did Adblade get so far so fast?  What’s their secret to success?  I did some research.  Adblade started in 2008 with a hand full of top tier publishing partners and an idea to use a new Internet ad unit.  Since that time almost 4 years ago, Adblade now partners with over 600 of the Web’s largest publishers and has relationships with thousands of the Web’s largest advertisers.  I have seen their ads on Readers Digest, CBS, MSNBC, Fox News, USA Today, NY Post, Yahoo, International Business Times and others.  Adsafe Media, which tracks website quality, now ranks chart The Secret to Adblade’s Success post Adblade’s traffic 188 out of 200 with 100 being the average industry score.  That’s a very high quality score and it speaks to their focus on premium-only publishers.  Here’s a screen shot of their Quantcast traffic report showing reach of nearly 180 million users.

That’s serious scale. I really like the News Bullet ad format not just because they’re so different then typical display ads but because I understand why advertisers and publishers need this new format to engage audiences.  If you use Facebook or LinkedIn you’ll notice they also use ad formats similar to Adblade’s News Bullets but Adblade has been doing it for a lot longer.   Adblade’s News Bullets aren’t just shown randomly like other ads and they are not contextual to the content of the page like Google ads are.   Adblade tells me that for many publishers especially in the news category, contextual ads don’t perform very well.  Instead, Adblade ads attempt to be directly relevant to the user.  Adblade serves ads which are location based, have location parameters or are most relevant to the user seeing the unit based on behavioral data.    Here’s a screen shot of some News Bullets.

ads The Secret to Adblade’s Success post In addition Adblade runs retargeting campaigns for hundreds of advertisers so the News Bullets people see are extremely relevant to their interests and that’s another reason why Adblade is able to generate such high click through rates.  Adblade doesn’t disclose what their annual revenues are but with 500 of the Web’s largest sites serving their ads and thousands of advertisers using their service, I’m guessing it’s significant.  The product development team at Adblade has been busy putting the final touches on additional advertising technology and services that will help advertisers and publishers achieve even better performance.  You can read more about Adblade at their Wikipedia page.

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  • Yo baby

    Interesting, I’ve seen these ads all over too. I thought it was a trend, I didn’t realize it was one company syndicating the ads.

  • Digiclicks

    I dont get it….if the ads are not contextual how do they compete with Google adsense on a CPM basis?

    • Sarina

      the ads are not contextual.  The article says that most news sites don’t have articles with enough vertical context to make google contextual ads work.  What ads would Google show on an article about Omar Kadafi being killed?  So rather then trying to be contextual to the page which no one can, these ads are personalized to the user, their location, interests etc.  Thats why they generate a higher cpm for the pubs

  • Screen name

    Of course these work better, who clicks on banners?

    • Vanilla clicks

      Well banners still work.  I think the Adblade ads are interesting and I can see why they have grown so fast but large brand advertisers still want to get their brand messages out even though they know that many users wont click the ads.  Its a big web, adblade is an important part but lets face it, banners arent going away.

  • Dinshe322

    I like the ones that move

  • Teachingjournalism

    Adblade is similar to adsonar is that you can buy individual sites from the adblade exchange right?

    • Brand-maniac

      You cannot buy individual sites with adblade.  They claim their algorithm will find the best ROI for the advertiser.   I think their pubs prefer this too as it doesn’t create any sales channel conflicts.

  • Mediamiles
  • Jeff J

    Adblade has continued to grow simply because they have acheived scale.  That alone can create a lot of value for pubs and advertisers.  I doubt their technology is something so amazing that its sole reason they are larger.  Sometimes simply being the largest creates value for everyone

  • Formaldihide

    I think Adblade is doing a lot of re-targeting for various advertisers.  When I left Amazon, I saw little ads for products that were similar to what I was buying on Amazon and they were coming from the web.adblade.com domain.  So I think this is how Adblade is generating higher CPMs for publishers. 

  • Roger T

    Quantcast ranks this network the largest network on the Web. Can this be true?  Cmon…larger then google?  http://www.quantcast.com/p-b8GPCpJxfqYm2

  • Havartycheeseeater

    Adblade is listed as number 19 on comscore but number one by Quantcast.  I would tend to beleive comscore…no offense to Quantcast.

  • Robdigital

    I was being retargeted by these little adblade ads.  I went to amazon and had purchased amn R2D2 remote control robot and when I was surfing the web i saw these little ads with more robots for sale at amazon.  So this maybe how adblade generates higher CPM’s for publishers

  • Danson67

    Adblade and Google are probably the ads I see the most on sites.  I don’t think Adblade is contextual to the page however, its more of behavioral targeting.  So i think for most vertical sites google is probably a better fit

  • Rumson-war

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