A new new job

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Yield1956 I have exciting (for me) news to share with you today – I have a new job, with the somewhat tongue-twisting title of Director of Yield Business Intelligence Product Management. I know, cool, huh?

In case you’re left a little non-plussed by precisely what Yield Business Intelligence is, let me enlighten you: I’m in charge of the systems that Microsoft has to analyze the yield of our online advertising inventory. My more long-standing readers may remember that I’ve blogged about yield before, in my Online Advertising 101 series of posts.

For an online publisher – in fact, for any advertising-funded business (hell, for any business) – yield and cost are what it’s all about. If you can’t sell your stuff for more than it cost you to make it, you’ve not got a viable business. So understanding yield, in detail, is essential. And that’s my new job. Should be a great opportunity to return to my analytics roots, but this time with a slightly different data set. And I get to continue to think about online advertising from the publisher/network perspective – something that I’ve really enjoyed doing in the past year.

So you can look forward to more posts here about the trials and tribulations of making money from online advertising inventory. Given the convulsions some parts of the industry are going through, it should be an interesting ride.

18 thoughts on “A new new job”

  3. Hey cool and congratulations! That’s a key role. Oh. Can you imagine how central you’ll be if Microsoft manages to get hold of and optimise some of Yahoo’s search inventory…

  5. Congrats, sounds awesome, and thats a bitchin’ title :). Is the position inward facing to analyze microsoft’s yield or are you working on new ways to improve publisher and network yield?

  9. Thanks, everyone, for kind comments. Eric: yes, this is internally focused, but it’s not all about Microsoft Owned & Operated inventory – we obviously represent a lot of third-party inventory (e.g. Facebook) also, so I’ll be analyzing the yield of that too.
    Only other thing I’ll add is that if you thought wrangling web analytics data was hard, combining sales & delivery data from three different ad serving systems is even tougher. The hard-to-say job title is the least of my worries 🙂
    Cheers,
    Ian

  15. Congrats Ian…monumental task in front of you and a challenge that is in need of tackling.
    Best of luck

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