Thought Leaders in Big Data: PubMatic CTO Anand Das and VP Engineering Sri Gopalsamy (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on the PubMatic context. Let’s talk about what you’re trying to deliver for your customers and what does Big Data bring to that process. Let’s get pretty granular and technical. Our audience is very sophisticated so you can get as interesting as possible in a nerdy way.

Sri Gopalsamy: I’ll take a shot at it. As Andy said, PubMatic is a marketing automation software company. In fact, PubMatic is the only independent company that created these automation platforms specifically for publishers. We enable publishers to automate their sales environment. Essentially, that’s what we’re trying to do. Our solution normally helps unify their platform to monetize their sites. Now, there’s a trend going on in the digital media industry where there is more advertising on multiple screens. Many of our publishers’ advertising revolves around desktop-based to mobile and tablet. Our platform helps identify and fully leverage the revenue of our publishers.

Anand Das: Whenever you’re viewing a web page which is hosted by a publisher, they might actually be serving content or providing some sort of service like e-commerce. For example, eBay. What they intend to do is not only make money using their content, they also earn money through ads. When you talk about ads, in every page view, you have at least three to four ads on the page. To make money, you have to make sure that the advertiser also gets good ROI and can connect with the audience.

There’s a lot of stuff that happens when the user loads the page. It all comes to PubMatic when asking, “Which ad would be ideal for the user and can generate a good amount of revenue from the publisher’s perspective?” When you talk about a simple thing as search, the user is sitting at a particular location. He might be somewhere in California, India, or Japan. Location is very important. Along with that, what the user has done till now. What is the kind of content is he reading? What is he interested in? What is he looking forward to? Along with that, the time of the day.

Basically, to get influence on what’s the mood and intent of the user, taking this particular piece of information and figuring out who are interested in this user, why are they interested in this user, what is it that they’re looking for in this particular user in terms of conversion and attribution, and then identifying the right ad for that user in real time and actually delivering it. Also making sure that you try to deliver an ad which is not only pleasing to the user, but also makes a good amount of revenue for the publisher. That is what PubMatic does in a layman’s terms.

As to why this is a Big Data problem, it is a Big Data problem because the amount of impressions and the volume of data that goes through our platform is huge. One example I can give you is we have over 20 billion ad impressions going through our platform in a single day. For each impression, we get multiple bits in real time from our partners and advertisers. When we did the math, it’s nearly five trillion bits per month, which is quite challenging for any platform to scale.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: PubMatic CTO Anand Das and VP Engineering Sri Gopalsamy
1 2 3 4 5 6