“We are the Booking.com, Airbnb, or Fiverr of the online advertising industry”
WhizzCo co-founder Alon Rosenthal sheds light on a tech field that thrived amid the Covid-19 crisis.
Calcalist, December 28, 2020 – A combination of smart market analysis, a niche that needed filling, and the biggest ongoing news story in a century, combined to make 2020 a breakout year for Israeli adtech company Whizzco. The Covid-19 pandemic may have decimated some industries, but it couldn’t have come at a better time for the online content sector and the advertising industry that powers it.
Whizzco, an Israeli startup that is stirring up the content recommendation world, was foresightful and lucky enough to be ready to take advantage of the endless news cycle that is the coronavirus crisis and strike with a solution that allows readers to dive deeper into the details or alternatively take a break from Covid-19 with a welcome diversion, but either way, generate clicks that spell revenues for advertisers and publishers.
“Until three or four years ago content recommendation was a small market. It only made up about 3-5% of advertising budgets. Today it makes up 25%, causing the industry to balloon to a $15 billion market, ten times what it was worth a decade ago,” Alon Rosenthal, the co-founder, and CEO of Whizzco said in an interview with CTech.
Until now,i the content recommendation business, or native ads as they’re known in the industry, was dominated by a small handful of platforms (two of the best known being Israeli-founded companies Taboola and Outbrain), with a few dozen more competing amongst themselves for subscribing publishers. What Whizzco introduced was a solution that aims to maximize publishers’ content revenue by combining network mediation, ad serving, and AI optimization, freeing them from having to commit to a single vendor and offering them over 40 content networks using a single service and dashboard.
“We are the Booking.com, Airbnb, or Fiverr of the ad industry,” said Rosenthal. “We work with 95% of the vendors and we did it by getting the vendors to understand that the competition is worth their while. No single company can buy all the traffic, across all locations and all platforms. We know how to send all the vendors to the most relevant markets, so everyone benefits.”