Company Background
SpotXchange was originally founded as a division of the search engine marketing technologies and services company, Booyah Networks. In March 2007, Booyah spun off SpotXchange to form a separate company focused on digital video advertising technology.
It all started when Booyah Networks was founded in early 2001 in Colorado by Mike Shehan (CEO) and Steve Swoboda (CFO/COO). Raising cash for an online marketing company during the height of the dot com crash proved challenging for the two founders, so they did what they could to cobble together angel funding from friends, family and area entrepreneurs. Pete Estler, founder of MatchLogic (a targeted display serving company acquired by Excite), invested by signing over the title of his Lamborghini to the company. Mike Shehan sold his historic house in Boulder, and Steve Swoboda took out a second mortgage on his home.
Starting SpotXchange
Having experienced strong growth and record profits in 2005, Booyah Networks began to investigate other online marketing verticals that it could pursue with its bank of intellectual property, capital and search marketing experience. Sights were set on online video advertising, a potentially explosive market that was beset with standardization and integration problems. Booyah Networks saw that many of the industry's problems could be solved by applying some of the best practices and technologies employed in the sponsored search market. Consequently, SpotXchange was formed in 2007, and at the time it was the first online video advertising marketplace.
In 2009, SpotXchange launched the industry’s first advanced targeting tools to help advertisers reach their audiences and continued to hire the team and expand nationally. In 2010, SpotXchange launched its real-time bidding solution, which helps companies tailor their bids on an impression-by-impression basis when bidding on in-stream and in-banner video ad inventory made available through SpotXchange's auction-based marketplace.
Today
With more than 400 million auctions per day, SpotXchange is the largest global marketplace of video ad inventory reaching 120 million unique visitors in more than 50 countries each month.The leading platform for programmatic buying and selling of digital video, SpotXchange connects thousands of publishers with advertisers, agencies, trading desks, DSPs and ad networks, running top brand campaigns through its IAB-certified marketplace. SpotXchange shows premium publishers and more than 1,000 world class advertisers that there is a better way to buy and sell digital video – with solutions that guarantee total transparency, brand safety and real-time control in either a private or public marketplace.
Each month, thousands of publishers harness the full revenue potential of their video inventory with complete control, and more than 300 major brand advertisers take advantage of SpotXchange’s video ad platform, which offers automated optimization, advanced targeting tools and flexible pricing models (cost per: view, engagement, click, thousand and acquisition). SpotXchange is one of the top video ad marketplaces in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada according to comScore’s VideoMetrix service.
In April 2012, SpotXchange launched SkipIt - a new service that allows consumers to control their online video experience by skipping ads whenever they want across the web. SkipIt was created to address the high abandonment rates (averaging between 16-37%!) in online video advertising, and to finally level the playing field between publishers, advertisers and ultimately, consumers. With SkipIt everyone wins! Consumers have the option to skip video ads for the first time, publishers get paid to NOT play ads, and advertisers don't pay for skipped ads.
SpotXchange is proud to be recognized by The Denver Post as a Top Workplace in the Denver Metro Area for 2012 & 2013.
