The Rubicon Project Reviewed

As many of you guys know, I started running the Rubicon Project here on the 30 Day Man to maximize the advertising networks available to me and basically make things easier rather than having to manage multiple networks, heaps of html code and rotating banners.

The Rubicon Project simply makes sense. No wonder it has won awards and looks to be the next big thing. Taking heaps of Ad Networks and doing the ground work for publishers is very smart.

However after a month or more of usage, I haven't seen the major results I was hoping for. Initially I was only running Rubicon here on the 30 Day Man - but after finding the interface easy to use and seeing the potential I rolled it out to my major sports and football blog at NRL Results and sadly the Rubicon Project failed to deliver.

Heres the scenario, prior to installing the Rubicon code - I was running vanilla AdSense on the website. Impressions were between 5000-6000 per day and my earnings were at least $20 USD or more each day.

After switching the AdSense for Rubicon, I saw a similar amount of impressions net me around $1-$2 a day. In a haste I quickly pulled the pin on the Rubicon code and went back to AdSense.

My first thoughts were; "Maybe the ad networks being used don't have the right content match for my sports site, which is Australian based and maybe suffering from USA only syndrome."

However, after a closer look - the Rubicon stats were broken down as follows: 4,350 impressions of Google AdSense for clicks totalling; 5 (CTR of 0.12) and earnings of $1.18. So how can the drop be so huge if they are using AdSense anyway? Pretty scary if you ask me.

1584 impressions went to Active Response Group for a total of 5 clicks also, and finally 851 went to CPX interactive for clicks of 1.

Pretty miserable stats. So the idea of Rubicon is great and I do hope more players come on board to advertise with them. I have been keen to speak to someone at Rubicon to get this all explained and hopefully that can happen. However, for now - I will keep Rubicon running here at the 30 Day Man as the content matching seems better and while the results haven't been awesome - they haven't been worse than previous testing with AdSense and other networks such as John Chows and the like.