YC S11 company seeks devs to help hack online advertising
We're an unannounced YC startup building a layer of web services that make it easy to run banner ad campaigns that outperform AdWords.

We've raised money from some of the best investors in the valley including a few of your heroes. Our stack runs on RoR, MongoDB, Redis, and Node. We use a lot of coffeescript. We're on pace to hit a spectacular run-rate in 6 months. We're looking for rails developers to join the team.

What we're building concerns everyone who does business on the web. It's a big deal that's worth your time and brainpower. Here's why:

In the last 3 years, a revolution has happened in display advertising (banner ads) as Madison Avenue marketers began using algorithms to buy and sell banner impressions in real-time^ and to alter the ads themselves in real-time^^ so they show the perfect message to every reader.

This combination of dynamic content and real-time ad buying lets the top brands run ad campaigns that blow AdWords away. Google knows this, which is why it bought DoubleClick a few years back^^^, and then more recently Invite Media^^^^ and now Admeld^^^^^. They're hoping to lock up display advertising like they locked up paid search.

We're building tools and services that introduce these techniques to the rest of the world. We're currently helping your favorite startups acquire users quickly and affordably. We're helping your favorite nightclubs fill up on off nights. We're helping small brands compete with the big guys.

If you want to be a part of taking digital advertising 2.0 to the masses, ping us at ads.can.be.rad@gmail.com

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^ These real-time ad buying platforms are called "DSPs" in the ad-tech world (Demand-side platform). It's a lot like HFT for online ads, with agencies programming "robots" to buy and sell inventory in milliseconds. The first DSPs came on the scene just a few years ago. Google predicts that 50% of all display ads will be bought via DSPs using algorithms by 2014. Software is taking over the ad world, too. I bet you had no idea online advertising was so interesting.

^^ Good examples of this kind of dynamic creative are those Zappos ads that show you the shoes you almost bought. Also, those Virgin America ads telling you about cheap flights from the city you're in to the city you visited last month. People are clicking the crud out of these things.

^^^ DoubleClick was the biggest player in the display space. Google bought them for $3.1b:
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/14/technology/14DoubleClick.html

^^^^ Invite Media, started by some young hackers from UPenn, managed to sew up the big agencies as customers. They were just pouring money through them and out onto the ad exchanges. Google bought them for $75m. Link: http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/03/google-confirms-invite-media/

^^^^^ AdMeld is what's known as an SSP or Supply-side Platform in the ad-tech business. Shortly after the DSPs came onto the scene, their algorithms started hammering publisher CPMs into the ground due to smart pricing. AdMeld and other platforms like it gave publishers easy ways to see what their ads were selling for and control that pricing. AdMeld signed up more publishers than anyone and was bought for $400m.
Link: http://venturebeat.com/2011/12/02/google-admeld-approved/