Advertising Analytics with Jonah Goodhart

Moat is one of the most successful advertising technology companies in history. After building a business from measurement of ad impressions, Moat was sold to Oracle for $850 million.

Advertising powers the free content on the Internet. Measurement makes it easier for publishers to monetize their content. At Software Engineering Daily, we know this from firsthand experience. The podcast ecosystem has barely any ability to measure success–and that can make it hard to entice advertisers. In podcasting, it is very difficult to understand if an advertising campaign is a success.

This illustrates why Moat is important. Improving the analytics on advertising helps publishers, brands, ad agencies, and adtech companies decide how to allocate their capital.

Why is it hard to measure advertising success? Why is this a difficult engineering problem? Because there are so many players in the space with conflicting incentives.

A brand wants to show ads to people who will buy a product. A publisher wants to display an ad that will maximize revenue. Adtech companies and ad agencies want to take the biggest cut possible from the transactions between brands and publishers. In the midst of all of this, fraudulent traffic providers offer cheap services that drain money from anyone who is not keeping a close eye on their deal flow.

In this fog of war, Moat’s goal is to provide transparency where possible. Moat CEO Jonah Goodhart joins this episode to talk about advertising analytics, viewability, and fraud.

If you like this episode, we have done many other shows about adtech and advertising fraud. You can check out our back catalog by going to softwareengineeringdaily.com or by downloading the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS, where you can listen to all of our old episodes, and easily discover new topics that might interest you. You can upvote the episodes you like and get recommendations based on your listening history. With 600 episodes, it is hard to find the episodes that appeal to you, and we hope the app helps with that.