The Rubicon Project Picks Up $15 More In VC Funding; Totals $21 Million To-Date

Coming off their selection as a 2008 AlwaysOn OnMedia 100 winner, The Rubicon Project has picked up another $15 million in Series B venture capital funding led by Mayfield Fund with participation from IDG Ventures Asia; Stanford University; University of California Berkeley; Matt Coffin, founder and former CEO of LowerMyBills.com and Clearstone Venture Partners, the company’s Series A investor.

A month ago the company claimed serving one billion ad impressions in the first six weeks of activity. The idea behind The Rubicon Project is easy — it will take the ad networks you work with and show the best paying ad for you as the publisher.

Erick Schonfeld, notes "The fact that they think there is a business here speaks to the inefficiencies of the online advertising market." I agree with Erick that there are huge inefficiencies in the ad network though The Rubicon Project is trying to actually solve a different problem.

The Rubicon Project is fixing the issue of "chaining" — that is where when an ad network can’t serve an ad, you chain to the next ad network in your rotation. Some publishers I know have chains that go 5-8 deep. Instead of chaining, The Rubicon Project tries to show the best paying ad first – which is better than using a chain because the chain has no idea which ad pays the best in a particular situation. The best paying ad could be last in the chain and you would never actually see it if a higher ad network fills the ad.

Other companies in this space include YieldBuild and PubMatic.