Moat raises $50m to create trading metric for digital ads

Online analytics firm, Moat, has raised $50m to create a standard metric to work as an online currency for the buying and selling of digital advertising, thus rivalling Google, Neilsen, comScore and other digital media companies. Moat co-founder and CEO, Jonah Goodhart, said “our ambition is to build the currency for digital advertising” - the aim is to encourage advertisers to negotiate ad deals using the new metric rather than using "ad serving" software.

Dive Brief:

Moat, an online analytics firm, raised $50 million for an ambitious goal – creating a standard metric to serve as an online currency for the buying and selling of digital advertising, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The metric would be in direct competition with some big players in the digital ad marketplace including Google, Nielsen and comScore.

Moat is known for offering third-party measurement for Facebook advertising, an integration that became global just last month.

Dive Insight:

Because digital advertising is moving away from banner ads and toward native and video ads on platforms like Facebook where Moat is already integrated, the company feels it has an opportunity to take on incumbent players like Google.

The new metric would be a measurement for advertisers and publishers on how much attention is paid to digital ads and how the user is impacted by the ads. According to the Journal, Moat’s goal is to have advertisers negotiate ad deals based on its new measurement metric rather than the more typical process of simply being billed depending on how many ads were served on webpages.

Along with Facebook, Moat also has viewability tracking partnerships with YouTube and Twitter.

Moat Co-Founder and CEO Jonah Goodhart told WSJ, "Our ambition is to build the currency for digital advertising," but also added that the company sees Nielsen and Google as potential partners rather than competitors.

The fact that Moat, and its investors, see this as a viable business move helps illustrate the change in digital advertising overall, moving from impression-based marketing to actual value in the ads served. A change that Facebook indicated recently after basically dropping banner ads from its Atlas ad platform in favor of higher value native and video ad units.