A long, strange, and ultimately rewarding trip, that’s what many involved in the past ten years at Federated Media, Lijit, and now sovrn Holdings might say. One year ago, give or take, we sold FM’s assets to LIN Media, and created sovrn Holdings, a programmatic data business focused on one mission: to foster an ecosystem where independent and influential publishers can thrive.
Sovrn has had an extraordinary year. It’s led the way in the fight against fraud, and has one of the cleanest networks in the industry. It’s a profitable, fast-growing business, and it’s more than quadrupled its network CPM – an amazing feat that is a testament to both eliminating fraud, as well as focusing on data science – understanding the reams of data the network throws off each day, and putting it to work for its 20,000+ publishers. And it’s that focus on data science that has led to sovrn’s latest crowning achievement: The launch of meridian, sovrn’s completely rethought publisher platform.
Meridian is a cooperative data-driven platform. So what does that mean? Publishers integrate with meridian – mainly because of its advertising platform – and when they do, they share their collective audience, advertising, and other data. Because sovrn has massive scale, we can share back information to publishers that no other platform offers – and we can do it for free.
So that’s what we’re doing. Meridian is a rich insights platform, featuring information about audience segments that was previously the domain of ad buyers alone. I’m excited about this for many reasons, but the main one comes down to this: For too long smaller publishers operated in the dark: They didn’t know who was buying their inventory, for how much, or how they stacked up against similar inventory across the Internet. Meridian is changing that. Over the coming months, sovrn will build more and more information sharing into the platform, all with the same goal: To level the playing field so that buyer and seller are on equal footing.
I’m super proud to be Chair of sovrn Holdings, and proud of CEO Walter Knapp and his entire team today. Congratulations, sovrn, on a major milestone, and here’s to many many more!
A few screen shots of meridian follow.
The main dashboard:
The comparative stats:
And the audience tab:
