Archive from 2014

We’re often asked how much it costs to make a Trading Desk system. We literally just the other day received this letter:
“…I must know how much it costs to develop a complete Agency Trading Desk, even just a ballpark figure… It would be a big help if you could give me an approximate cost…”

When you start developing what our correspondents imply by an Agency Trading Desk (ATD), it turns out that their understandings differ.

We have several ATDs at various stages of development. Before starting development, we looked at quite a few commercial systems. “Looked at” isn’t the best word, but maybe evaluate; by this we mean our analysts combed the length and breadth of functions and conducted a detailed analysis of the fundamental features.

We’ll soon be placing a description of several systems here. We will start with TheTradeDesk and Cappture. These choices may seems somewhat strange. TheTradeDesk is without a doubt the leader in its field; it’s a full DSP with a very richly functional ATD, especially in terms of RTB purchasing. Cappture is a new and, at the moment, fairly unknown system. As it turned out, one of our Japanese clients, a digital agency representative, uses exactly these systems and wanted to create several hybrid functions in their own ATD system.
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The task of forecasting traffic

When making banner advertising solution, it’s very important to provide advertisers with the possibility of campaign forecasting. This kind of forecast lets the user know:

  1. If it’s possible to return the necessary number of impressions in a planned period
  2. Potential banner placement for a given advertising space with given targeting conditions.

Practically all modern advertising platforms (Google, AdWords, OpenX, Yandex.Direct) provide forecasts, although usually without mentioning the quality of the forecast. We will speak in more detail about how a forecast system can be built and what the factors influence the quality of the forecast.

A typical forecast system uses a cumulative advertising-space statistics system as a starting point.
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