The world of digital advertising is a complex, rapidly evolving ecosystem that powers much of the free content we consume online. At the heart of this system is programmatic advertising, a technology that automates the buying and selling of ad space in real time. In this conversation, Nataraj sits down with Jared Siegal, the founder and CEO of Attitude, a company at the forefront of empowering publishers to maximize their revenue in this competitive landscape. Jared shares his unexpected entry into the ad tech industry, demystifies concepts like header bidding and ad exchanges, and explains how his company’s SaaS model is disrupting the status quo. They also explore the seismic shifts caused by AI in search, the ongoing debate around Google’s market dominance, and what the future holds for content creators and publishers trying to navigate this intricate digital world.
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Nataraj: So I think a good place to start would be how did you get into this ad business?
Jared Siegal: Totally by accident. I don’t think anyone grows up saying, “I’m going to serve ads on the internet” or even really understands that this part of the economy exists. I went to school for econometrics, which is applying economic theory to math problems and vice versa. I couldn’t even tell you how I got into that, but as I was getting ready to graduate, I really wanted to work in the car industry. I reached out to every graduate from my university who worked at Ford, Chevy, and all the major brands here in the US. Couldn’t get a job.
I went to the head of our school’s entrepreneurship program and said, “Hey, I got a cool idea for a class I wanna teach here.” I pitched it to him, and he said, “This is a great idea, but I really think you should meet this guy, a former graduate from our school. He runs a company called Answers.com.” I met him, and frankly, I had no idea what they did. I didn’t understand it. He offered me a job and I said sure. And that’s how I got into online advertising. I had a choice of working on the revenue side of the business or the cost side. I was always taught growing up to always be a revenue driver, so I chose the revenue side. That forced me into Ad Ops, and very quickly, within a few months, I fell in love with this industry.
Nataraj: So what were you doing? Was it trying to grow revenue or grow traffic?
Jared Siegal: It was twofold. One was actually trying to grow revenue, and one was trying to grow traffic, which obviously indirectly and directly grows your revenue. On the revenue side, this was right when DFP, now GAM, was created. So I was literally learning how to integrate DFP on a website, figuring out how to get away from this concept of a waterfall auction into something a bit more programmatic and real-time, and creating a bunch of different layouts and page types to understand which ad units, sizes, and arrangements make us the most money.
Nataraj: Can you explain DFP and the waterfall concept?
Jared Siegal: Yeah, DFP, which is now called GAM, is Google’s ad server. It’s used by almost every website on the planet to host the final auction of that ad on your website. Before that, people were hard-coding ads on their websites and hoping they made money. The creation of the ad server meant that you as a publisher could host an auction, get a bunch of people to compete for that ad, and choose the highest winner. Waterfall is this idea of, let me call Google, if Google doesn’t fill, let me call partner B, if partner B doesn’t fill, let me call partner C. Where we are today in programmatic is, let’s get Google, partner A, B, C, D, E, F, G, all to compete in real-time. They all bid at the same time, and whoever wins, wins. It’s a little bit faster, a little bit more efficient, and it’s far more accurate in terms of valuing your audience.
Nataraj: So let’s explain the lay of the land today. For example, I go to a site like verge.com and I see display ads. What are all the players involved when I’m seeing that ad? Who’s the publisher, who’s the bidder, who’s the exchange, and what is Google’s role versus Attitude’s role?
Jared Siegal: Okay, cool. So you go to that website; the website is the publisher. They’re the one that is publishing the content, and you’re on that site because you like their content. When that ad gets served, 99% of the time that publisher probably uses Google Ad Manager as their ad server. It’s what eventually makes the final decision of who had the highest bid from all of these exchanges. Google is also an exchange, but there are hundreds of exchanges that work with publishers directly and tens of thousands behind the scenes. All of these exchanges need what’s called a wrapper to host this auction and pass all the different bids and ad creatives into Google Ad Manager so it can make a decision. And that’s what Attitude does. There’s a handful of companies that do that part of the business. You have the ad server, you have the advertisers, and you have the company that is connecting the advertisers to the publishers. Attitude is that connection.
Nataraj: So you collect the different bids for the ad spot. Where are you collecting them from?
Jared Siegal: It’s all happening in the browser in real-time. Publishers basically load our code in the head of their page. On page load, boom, we instantly start pinging all these different advertisers they have relationships with to find the highest bids and send them along. It’s happening in milliseconds. For that one ad to be served to you on that one website, there were probably millions of different agencies, brands, and companies that got pinged in a matter of milliseconds to say, “Do you have something for me?”
Nataraj: Why do customers choose Attitude versus just using Google? Because it feels like Google is a competitor here.
Jared Siegal: To some extent. You could go directly with one exchange, and they’ll probably be able to serve most of your ads. But what happens when you only have one exchange is it’s no longer really an auction. They can pay whatever they want for that ad because they don’t have to beat out anyone else. Where a company like Attitude comes into play is we say, don’t let Google or Facebook dictate the value and price of that ad. Have a bunch of people compete and let the highest one win. In an auction, you want as many bidders as possible. You don’t want one person bidding because then they’ll just bid a dollar and they’ve won.
Nataraj: So it’s better to use Attitude to create a neutral playing field.
Jared Siegal: Yeah, you need some piece of technology to do that because Google Ad Manager and most ad servers don’t natively integrate all of the other exchanges. They’re limited to their own exchange. So if you want a bunch of exchanges to compete, you need this third-party tech to layer on your page. How we separate ourselves is our business model and the fact that we are agnostic. Everyone else in our space takes a percentage cut of the publisher’s business. We don’t have ulterior incentives to let one exchange win more because they pay us a higher rev share. It’s irrelevant to us who wins. We just want the publisher to make as much money as possible. We built a pretty big name for ourselves as the first SaaS pricing model in this space.
Nataraj: Let’s talk about Google’s role. Do you have a view on the whole trial of Google as a monopoly?
Jared Siegal: Let me preface this by saying we’re a really good partner of Google’s, and Google’s a great partner of Attitude. But there’s a reason why companies like mine exist, and that is because Google has historically had the last look at every auction. If they’re the ad server being used, they see all the other bids that come in, and after they see all that, they can say, “Hey, do I want to bid one penny more and steal that impression?” That starts getting into this idea of, is it really a fair auction? Companies like mine have been coming up with creative ways to make it fairer, whether it’s through setting price floors or creating our own ad server. With all of the recent news about monopolization, if you’re in our space, you’re kind of sitting back saying, “Yeah, obviously this has been going on for 20 years. Everyone knows this.”
Nataraj: How did you start as a consulting firm and transition to a full-fledged product company?
Jared Siegal: I started this company by accident. I quit my job and just wanted to do something on my own, so I started consulting for a bunch of publishers I had become friendly with, charging them by the hour. I did that for about 12 to 14 months and got the business up to close to a million-dollar run rate. Back then, auctions were second-price, meaning the winner pays one penny higher than the second-highest bid. I made a career for a year of trying to figure out the gap between the first and second bids and setting minimum prices to capture more revenue. Then Google said everything’s moving to a first-price auction, and my whole business model was gone. At that time, a lot of my clients were using the same header bidding company and having a lot of issues. They were paying me an hourly rate to communicate those issues to this third-party company. I realized, why am I helping someone else grow their business? I should build this piece of tech myself, do a better job, and sell it to my existing clients. I gave it away for free for six or seven months to grow the tech, and eventually, I converted all my clients. At that point, I got an offer to buy the company from an ad exchange. I was blown away. I sat down with my wife and some friends, and they all said, “Don’t sell, grow the business.” So I called up my best friend, who’s now our CTO, and said, “Quit your job. Come over here. Let’s build something.” And the rest is history.
Nataraj: Post-ChatGPT and Google’s AI search results, how is that affecting publishers?
Jared Siegal: For sure. The fact that Google rolled out AI in its search results radically changed SEO. If you’re a website where the majority of your content is easily answerable in one sentence or a yes/no manner, AI is going to crush your business because the answer appears in the search results and the user never clicks through to your website. If you’re a site that has opinionated, long-form content, or things that are not a simple question-answer relationship but more like thought pieces, you’re probably much safer, at least for now. AI inside of search results has made the internet worse. I think most publishers would agree. Every piece of tech developed in our industry has always been to help the biggest players—advertisers and search engines—not publishers. AI has a huge impact on traffic for a lot of publishers.
Nataraj: Internet traffic seems to be shrinking or consolidating, but Google and Facebook are still increasing ad revenue. How is that possible?
Jared Siegal: To some extent, it’s pricing control, but also an important piece of information is that any search engine probably makes more money from the ads served in their search results than the revenue share they get on ads they help serve on publisher websites. If you search on Bing and click on one of the paid search results, they probably made a dollar. If you click a link to a publisher’s website, they might make a few pennies. There’s a huge asymmetry and a conflict of interest here. It behooves them to not send you traffic and to keep you within the search results page. They make more money that way.
Nataraj: What’s a common misconception about running a company that you’ve found not to be true?
Jared Siegal: There’s this concept that was hot a few months ago about founder-led versus employee-led businesses, and many people were anti-founder-led. I am very involved in the day-to-day of Attitude, from cutting checks to talking with publishers to running A/B tests to negotiating deals. I love it and I do it all. I think a successful entrepreneur and leader is someone that actually understands all aspects of the business. People say, “Just hire smarter people and have them handle all that.” 100%, have them handle it, but you better understand what they do better than they do. If you want to run a successful company, you need to understand every penny that comes in and every penny that goes out. We’re very much a founder-led business, and I think it’s what has allowed us to scale up as quickly as we did.
Jared’s insights reveal the intricate balance of power in the ad tech industry and the critical need for solutions that champion publishers. As AI continues to reshape content discovery, the strategies discussed in this conversation offer a valuable roadmap for navigating the future of digital monetization.
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