Wednesday, February 10, 2021
Interview with Jon Waterman, Founder and CEO of Ad.net
For today's interview, we sat down to catch up with Jon Waterman, the founder and CEO of Ad.net, to understand what the company's business is nowadays, how the company has evolved over the years, and how the company has adjusted to life during a pandemic.
What is Ad.net?
Jon Waterman: We envision ourselves today as a marketplace outside Google and Bing. Our core competency, historically, has been in the pay-to-click space, but we've focused completely outside of Google and outside of Bing. What does that mean? We're an intent-driven marketplace. All of the supply we are accessing and selling to advertisers and agencies we are working with have high levels of intent. That's people looking for a particular running shoe, we're accessing keyword intent to drive people to Reebok, who is an advertiser of ours.
Talk about the market, when you say you're outside Google and Bing, explain what that means?
Jon Waterman: One of the things we continually hear from advertisers we work with, it they are tired of the domination. They want to diversify their search spend. They typically have specific budgets lined up, and they're looking for ways to diversity, and also access new customers. We pride ourselves in being able to add incremental consumers to our advertisers. We're able to do that by the traffic we tap into. What does that mean specifically? A little history, we launched our product years ago, Search IQ. That product right now is on 2,000 publisher websites, it's sold under the SaaS model, and a lot of people on the free, ad-supported version. You can check out Parenting.com, MyWedding.com, ThePennyHoarder.com, all these sites are using Search IQ technology, and it's our own version of inside search. It's a search engine, crawling a publisher's website, coming up with the most relevant content so when a search is performed, we give the user all the relevant results with a nice looking feel as well.
How long has Ad.net been around?
Jon Waterman: I got into the space personally in March of 1998. I got in early on, acquiring domain names and monetizing the type in traffic those domain names would kick off. As you can imagine, there's a lot of keyword intent in a typical domain name. People are still typing in coolcars.com, and if there is no website, the opportunity to extract intent and drive the user to a particular advertiser's landing page or product page is lost. The company was founded in 2001, as Findology Interactive Media. Our core competency was in the search space. We got into the pay-per-click space early on, when Idealab launched Goto.com, which eventually became Overture and was acquired by Yahoo. I sold that business in late 2007, right before the debt crisis, and sold it to a public company in Australia. Years later, I bought the company back, and we rebranded in 2012 to Ad.net. We've been around for quite awhile.
There have been changes in how people search, such as mobile devices. How has that affected you?
Jon Waterman: I wouldn't say it has affected us in a negative or positive way. As mobile phones have become increasingly more usable, in a productive manner, we've seen more and more mobile traffic. As we've started to see certain processing services like Apple Pay and what not take shape, it's been easier to pay for things online. We're seeing lots of transactions over mobile compared to the past.
What's the biggest lesson you've learned in how to success in search advertising?
Jon Waterman: What we realized earlier on, is performance is critical. Without performance, you're not recession proof. Marketing dollars start to go away in any difficult economy. That's because even though building a brand is very very valuable, during a difficult economy, you want to know when you're spending a specific amount of money, that you're getting those dollars back, and then some. Return on ad spend is what we focus on, across the board. That varies depending on merchant and advertiser. Performance has been key. We've doubled down on performance and high levels of keyword intent traffic.
How has this pandemic affected you and your business?
Jon Waterman: I imagine everybody was hit hard when the pandemic first took hold. Our April and May numbers were very low. We started to rebound pretty quickly in June and July, and it's just gotten better and better. That's because we're in the online marketing world, which in every industry, except perhaps travel, has seen a huge uptake. E-commerce has become a huge factor. Prior to the pandemic, about 1/3 was e-commerce. Now, this calendar year, it's upward of 40% plus. We're seeing a lot more people online, making purchases online, for the first time in some cases. I don't think we're going to see that go away. From a cultural perspective, I've been proud of my team, because we've been able to maintain that culture even in a work-from-home environment. It's been difficult to maintain that level of communication and collaboration all within the realm of Zoom and Slack and whatnot. That's been proven to work a lot better in a lot of cases, and I think it will change how we move forward with corporate office space. I've always been one to try to take positives from negatives, and I think we've been able to accomplish that.
What's the next thing we should watch from Ad.net?
Jon Waterman: We're continuously innovating with new products and initiatives. Our core competency is focusing on high quality customers to our advertisers. We're always trying to determine what else we could be adding. We've recently added an incremental social product, we're leveraging all of our keyword intent data and recapturing them on Facebook to add incremental customers our advertisers are doing on social media. We're launching in the near future a publisher facing technology which we call “presearch” doubling down on intent and keyword traffic, and reading the context of publisher articles, and come up with the appropriate questions one might ask after reading an article. Not only are we focused on new products for our advertisers, we're also trying to access more and more supply through proprietary technology.
Thanks for the interview!