1028 Advertisers Put $250m Through Him Last Year As Top Google, Facebook Alternative
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn. Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple of hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million. I had no money when I started the company. It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs. We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Dan Greenberg.
He's the CEO and co-founder of ShareThru, a platform which powers in-feed native advertising for many of the world's largest publishers. Dan, are you ready to take us to the top?
Yes, sir.
All right, man. So tell us more about ShareThru. What do you guys do and what's your business model? How do you monetize?
Sure. I started the company actually almost 10 years ago before the word native advertising existed. And the original thesis for the company was that ads should fit in. So instead of ads being this foreign object that sits in the corner of a page, instead of ads being kind of this interrupted thing that forces attention, our thought from the very beginning was let's allow publishers. So like Rolling Stone and Time Inc and Hearst and ABC News, Disney, folks like that, to monetize their sites on the web as respectfully and as modernly as Facebook does on Facebook or as Twitter does on Twitter. So we're the software company that a company like Vice or Disney or ABC would use to power what we call native ads, integrated, choice-based, respectful advertising inside their own sites and apps, like a Rollingstone.com, Vice.com, ABCnews.com.
We're the software company that powers that for them.
And Dan, is it true software or is it a combination SaaS plus cut of spend through your platform?
Yeah, software and media. So we're the core software that they use to create and manage all their native placements. So all the integrations, all the pages, all the designs, all the workflow rules. And you charge for that as a SaaS model or no, you give it away for free? We charge for that as a SaaS model. And then on top of that, we allow them to sell their inventory through a programmatic ecosystem. Programmatic advertising is like all the pipes that connect to each other. And so we act as the software that enables them to sell their media through the pipes. As a result of that, then they pay us a rev share on revenue earned through that programmatic ecosystem.
Revenue earned or like, well, I guess, so when you say earned, you mean the publishers are earning. Do you also work with the advertisers? So it'd be kind of what they're paying through the platform or no? Yeah, two sides of the same coin.
We go out to market and we activate demand. both through direct sales, but also through content marketing and relationships and just events. Our job in the ecosystem is to breathe life into this new ecosystem. This type of advertising is new. It's not new as of yesterday, but it's new in the course of time. Advertising that's been predicated on interruption, has been the baseline forever. So forever up until maybe 10 years ago, advertising, especially digital advertising, was kind of the clockwork orange, hold your eyes open, force you to watch this ad whether you like it or not. And the new normal doesn't start from that premise. The new normal starts from the premise of I'm going to earn attention.
And if I have to earn attention, my creative strategy changes, my media strategy changes, my marketing and targeting strategy changes, like the whole thing changes. So our job, to your question, is to activate demand in the market, both with the media buyers, with the advertisers and marketers, with the product marketers, with the PR firms and the creative agencies and kind of everyone in between.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–4:23
2
What business does Sharethrough build and how do they monetize native ads?
4:23–9:19
3
How does Sharethrough’s software and programmatic rev-share model work?
9:19–23:12
4
How does Sharethrough compete with Google and Facebook’s ad duopoly?
23:12–24:57
Speakers
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