Case Study

Vuukle: Focuses on Business, While Confiant Handles Bad Ads

Overview

Vuukle is a publisher workspace solution designed to maximize ad revenue, improve site speed, and amplify audience engagement. They help publishers monetize their websites while providing various types of solutions and services including: commenting, reactions, social sharing, real time analytics, data aggregation.

Ravi Mittal, CEO and Founder describes why Vuukle is unique, “Over the last few years, Vuukle has scaled to serve roughly 450 websites globally, and manage nearly 300 million unique users monthly. We combine two different aspects of publishers’ business, user engagement and monetization. Normally you find companies purely focused on ad monetization, or solely provide SaaS-based publishers’ tools and services. We've successfully achieved providing a cost-effective solution to the problem of improving user engagement and monetization, without adding to publisher costs. The publisher earns more money, and gets a rich set of tools, techniques, and services for free under one roof with the Vuukle solution.”

THE ORIGINAL PROBLEM

What was your biggest challenge?

Everybody in the publishing industry wants their websites to be as fast as possible. Publishers end up working with so many different partners and vendors that it becomes difficult to ensure that their website is optimized for speed, without stealing away resources that produce quality content. The industry has imposed a Faustian bargain where control gets sacrificed for speed.

While we were ramping up our efforts to monetize websites for bloggers small and large (from a few hundred thousand pages to a few hundred million), everything came into view. Ad quality, and ad security are nearly as important as content to the user experience. Before Confiant, one of the things that literally made me pull hair out of my head (ha, ha) was that people complained about ad security, pop-up redirects, and mobile redirects. We tried several of the top ad security solutions in the market, which made my own business difficult to manage. How to keep our focus onboarding new publishers, and creating really good products, while tracking billions of impressions simultaneously, to make sure nothing bad slips through? We needed a partner who had expertise at ad security, blocking, and quality issues, so we could focus on growing our own business.

FINDING THE RIGHT SOLUTION

How did you choose among solutions?

While cost was an important factor in our decision making, we realized early on that there’s no compromising on ad quality. When you are serving ads on a website you don’t want user complaints on social media.

One or two of our customers’ websites were having recurring problems back then. We had no way to reproduce their problems, because the Malvertising attacks were often super-targeted down to a city, a country, even an IP address, or browser type. There were too many variables to consider.

We tested several well-known vendor solutions and found them unable to resolve the issues. We created an internal benchmark to track pop-up redirect complaints and as soon as we put Confiant into the picture, BOOM - the problem was solved. After trying at least four different vendors, Confiant really came out on top and solved those problems.

It pains me that we delayed signing with Confiant. We lost an important client that represented at least ten websites before installing Confiant. If we had Confiant, I’m certain they would still be a Vuukle customer.

RESULTS

What needs to be blocked is being blocked, and we're not getting any complaints, even as the attacks evolve. If Confiant wasn't doing their job for the last three years, I would have been drowned in complaint emails, because of our ten percent month-over-month growth rate. It is very difficult to survive in this industry unless you are managing security and quality. I can literally count on three fingers, all of the complaints we received in the past two years. Because I don't need to think about the bad ads, I get to pay attention to optimizing the good ads for our publishers and now we just focus on growing our business.

Our conception of ‘bad ads’ has evolved the deeper we’ve integrated the controls Confiant gives us. Today we focus a lot of our day to day tweaks of Confiant on ad quality issues and trust the Confiant Team to stay on top of the evolution and surges in Malvertising attacks, which have been especially noticeable since Q4 of last year when forced redirect phishing attacks made a comeback.

I want to credit the support team, who are really very good. Even on the weekends or odd hours, when I've sent emails to the support team, they always reply within a few hours. I appreciate the responsiveness because you guys understand that this is technically not a Monday to Friday business. I appreciate the extra effort. There's no doubt about your support team, you guys are amazing at support.

CONCLUSION

What do you like best about the solution?

I definitely love Confiant's hassle-free integration that has scaled with our growth. Programmatically I can take your code, embed my header bidding script, and customize it to the details that I want for specific cases. Every developer’s dream is ultimate transparency, in terms of code implementation. One of Confiant’s Unique Selling Points (USPs) is that for any function that you are executing on your end, there's always a call back function that we can use in any manner we want. It gives me peace of mind the way Confiant implemented their code allows me to do a lot of customization with a degree of flexibility also.

What competitive advantages does the solution provide?

One of the biggest advantages that I gained by using Confiant is that I can focus on my own business, and do not have to use my time to figure out which SSP is the culprit of the latest issues. We probably lost or would still be losing money because we couldn't manage the Real Time Bidding (RTB) option efficiently. We could work with other ad partners efficiently, but RTB inserts some bad ads, and a lot of manual intervention time to resolve them. We couldn’t have scaled as we did while we were digging for a needle in the haystack to resolve problems. Confiant is there by default for every website install, every option, and for every header bidding request that we manage. That gives me the peace of mind that I don't have to worry about anything. Onboarding a premium website like the New York Times, or onboarding a niche website that only a thousand people visit, is nearly equal in importance. The bottom line is that there was a tremendous amount of time savings, so we are able to focus and grow our business, because we are providing the best technology to protect websites and their users. Confiant has really become a very integral part of our business.

The reason why we're confident in monetizing nearly ten billion ad impressions per month without any hesitation, is that we know that Confiant is going to be watching over every single ad impression, so our publishers need not worry about ad quality. I understand the problems that publishers are or were facing in the past. If they had been using Confiant, they wouldn't have had those problems in the first place. If they are monetizing their website with Vuukle, they are protected, because we use Confiant to protect them.

Vuukle: Focuses on Business, While Confiant Handles Bad Ads

INTERVIEW WITH RAVI MITTAL

Ravi Mittal