How a great software push Yieldbird to Deloitte List? (Interview)

Once upon a time, there was a market without any AdX Optimization. Then a Yieldbird appeared and changed the reality of many publishers. How did it happen? We talked with Greg Kubrakiewicz, Head of Technology at Yieldbird, who explains, how the cooperation with Codest has made it possible to be listed 16th in Deloitte ‘Technology Fast 50 Central Europe‘.

How was this whole idea born?

Greg Kubrakiewicz: It all began with Adtaily, which allowed small advertisers like hairdressers or hotels to place their ads on larger portals on regional Gazeta.pl sites. The Adtaily ad network was working with them. In the meantime, Marcin Ekiert and Piotrek Niedziela, inspired by Fredrik, started playing from the publisher’s side with AdX settings and noticed that in this way they were able to make more money with them. It was also related to the fact that all the money on the market in programmatic come from advertisers.

The whole programmatic focused then on the source of money from the buyers’ side, the market was tight, the competition was large. Based on gained knowledge, we created Yield Optimization and for several years we were becoming more and more experienced on many markets.

The next step was an attempt to write software which will automate and improve all these concepts in two ways: either by automation and increasing the scale, or by using more complex algorithms that will be better than a human.

How did the implementation process work?

It took a bit of time to find a way on how to automate it, get to know the process, the way it works, invent some ways for it and how to tell developers from Codest about it so that they could produce a tool that creates added value. And then it went like a snowball effect, it spread, we had more and more ideas what to optimize.

Later on, we made a whole class of products, i.e. a wrapper which really automated processes such as creating setups for publishers. Setups are constructions that help these publishers increase profits by increasing demand, it required the publisher to install javascript codes, integrate with the site. It was quite complicated, mainly due to the Javascript code which has to be integrated with a website, and not every publisher has their own development resources. As well as both the language and cultural barriers with the publishers could be quite an obstacle. Therefore, it was clear that we needed Codest to create an easy and user-friendly product.

How did the market welcome Yieldbird?

The publishers’ market, the supplier of advertising space, was quite empty, there were no products dedicated to these publishers. So the idea of optimizing the advertising space worked. The next stage was the idea for a service that will help publishers earn more from the advertising space and exert more pressure on advertisers.

Some welcomed us really warmly, as they really wanted to make more money, but some were very suspicious, or we could not explain to them what it all was about. The barrier of understanding is quite large because it is not an easy or cheap product. Each publisher is in a different situation and a different setup, that’s why our products are cut to measure and grow together with our publishers.

More about details between Codest and Yielbird you can read on Clutch.