How MonetizeMore Monetized 1000+ Publishers Worldwide, Shares CEO Kean Graham

Kean Graham, CEO & Founder, MonetizeMore

As the CEO and Founder of MonetizeMore, Kean Graham has been a driving force behind the company's growth to $83M ARR.

Published: Mon 22 Aug 2022, 2:34 PM

He has led MonetizeMore to become a widely successful global advertising technology company that has helped 1,000+ web publishers and app developers achieve long-term revenue growth.

Here are excerpts of his interaction:

Could you explain the current industry landscape and where MonetizeMore fits in?

MonetizeMore exists to empower ad monetized publishers with technology to cater to the demands of premium and enterprise publishers (e.g., Bored Panda, Unico Studio, and IndiaMART). We empower these websites and apps to increase their ad revenues and decrease business risks with auction technology, an ad revenue platform, bot detection software, and other optimization tools. MonetizeMore provides the technology on the sell-side of the adtech industry. In other words, we work directly with publishers to help them sell their ad inventories for more.

The sell-side of the adtech industry is a subset of digital advertising, proliferating as advertisers substantially moved their spending from traditional channels to the internet. This high year-over-year growth doesn't come without its challenges, though. The adtech industry has experienced challenges such as privacy regulation, ad fraud, and the deprecation of third-party cookies, requiring companies to make strategic adjustments.

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What kind of challenges and problems is MonetizeMore addressing?

At MonetizeMore, we are committed to helping publishers experience high-quality service with our comprehensive ad operations platform, PubGuru. Our AI-powered interface allows publishers to analyze their real-time ad revenue stats on a unified dashboard rather than spending hours on data entry.

However, this is not the only pain point that ad monetized publishers face. PubGuru also solves the below pain points:

- No idea what parts of their publisher business are most profitable: Our profit attribution report provides revenue stats for each traffic source so they can decide where to invest more.

- Publisher ad inventories tend to break often: PubGuru Ad Inspector crawls their page in real-time and uncovers any ad setup issues and how to fix them. Any publisher can use this tool for free!

- No clue how to optimize ad revenue: Smart notifications can be found in PubGuru to recommend what to adjust on their site step-by-step to increase their ad revenues.

- Invalid traffic could destroy their business overnight: Traffic Cop detects and blocks invalid traffic to prevent ad network account bans and reduce revenue clawbacks. It also boosts traffic quality to entice bidding from the most prominent advertisers that watch traffic quality metrics per domain.

How do you stand out from your competitors? What are your USPs?

Many adtech partners are rigid and do not focus on long-term value. The four most significant aspects that make MonetizeMore stand out from the alternatives include:

Ad Inventory Ownership: While many of our competitors force publishers to use their DNS, ad server, and ad network accounts, we provide flexibility to run all those for full ad inventory ownership.
Transparency: PubGuru provides full data transparency in terms of sources of revenue and allows users to delve deep into their ad revenue data. This data is also verifiable since PubGuru has the flexibility to integrate with your ad networks and ad server. Therefore, you can verify the validity of the PubGuru stats by comparing them to your own records.
Customization: No two publishers are the same, and MonetizeMore knows that a one-size-fits-all approach doesn't cut it when it comes to ad optimization. We provide custom setups for each of our clients to ensure that they're making the most money possible and providing their users with the best experience.
Performance: We offer a unique blend of technology and manual optimization to get the best results for our publishers. We've proven time and time again that our approach outperforms the competition in split tests. We ensure that we provide the highest Session RPMs to our publishers.

Why should web publishers outsource their ad operations? Is it a cost-effective solution?

Being able to run ad operations in-house for a publisher is quite challenging. Publishers have many sides of their business to master. Making ad operations a core competency is a significant challenge. Many mid-sized and large publishers have outsourced their ad operations and tech because they would otherwise be leaving a lot of money on the table.

Adtech innovation isn't realistic within an organization that doesn't have adtech at its core. We eat, breathe and dream of adtech at MonetizeMore. Therefore, we've built sophisticated technology that enables publishers to get the highest revenue return from their traffic. Best of all, there are no upfront costs! MonetizeMore charges based on performance via flexible revenue share. If the publisher's revenues go up, so does MonetizeMore's share. Hence, the incentives are aligned.

How has the industry evolved in the post-pandemic times in terms of work culture?

The adtech industry’s work culture has been pretty conservative in the past, with most companies operating like corporate advertising agencies rather than cutting-edge tech firms. However, this is slowly changing. Post pandemic, many adtech companies are open to the idea of remote work. Some do a hybrid model; some require employees to be in the same time zone, while others are more flexible. And some companies have fully embraced remote work, letting their team members work from wherever they want and reap the benefits of a location-independent workforce.

Remote work culture is integral to MonetizeMore's DNA, as the company with 250+ team members has been thriving in the virtual environment for over 12 years.