Yahoo to Boot Brokers from Right Media Exchange

Yahoo won’t say how many of Right Media’s 120,000 participants will get the boot as it cleans up the exchange in the coming weeks. But it’s clearly a large figure.

“The percentage number would overwhelm people,” said Bill Wise, Yahoo’s VP and general manager of ad platforms. But Wise added that for all the people and companies being kicked off the system, the impact on impression volume will be relatively slight.

“We’re preserving the vast amount of market liquidity,” he said. “We’re preserving the liquidity that counts.”

Early last week Yahoo announced its plans to scour Right Media of arbitragers, nudging it up-market in an appeal to major brands. As part of the process, Right Media is dividing existing clients into customer segments. For each one, the company will make the call, “We’re selling to them or not selling to them,” said Wise.

Many of the affected parties are arbitragers that bring little value. Some call themselves ad networks but don’t deserve the name. “A lot of companies are just brokers acting like ad networks,” he said.

Right Media has also developed a tool designed to help agencies and clients buy media directly on the exchange. Some are already testing the interface, which Wise called “critical to getting the right [kind of] demand.”

Critics still decry Right Media’s lack of real-time bidding capabilities. Wise is somewhat dismissive of the complaint. For ad buyers to engage in real-time bidding on Right Media, he said, “They’ll need to process 100,000 ad requests per second. There are very few companies with the processing power and the hardware to accomplish that.”

But he promised Right Media will work with companies with those abilities.

Matt Spiegel, CEO at OMG Digital, agreed that real-time bidding is not yet a reality for most ad buyers. “There are only a small handful doing real-time,” he said.

But he insisted OMG can handle the oceans of ad calls with the help of infrastructure providers. “We are, through our technology partners, capable of doing real-time,” he said.

Meanwhile Wise sees other routes to real-time bidding. One would be to become interoperable with other ad exchanges, such as the new DoubleClick Exchange from Google.