Just a quick update on my professional life. I recently joined TripleLift’s engineering team. I met the founders while at ERA and liked the problem they were solving. It was also time for me to move on from my other projects so when I found out they were growing it was a pretty easy decision. Being a startup, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what everyone’s responsibilities are since everyone becomes a generalist but I’ve been focused on the data side. This entails developing our various data pipelines, leveraging the data we have to improve performance and unlock new opportunities, and doing some light data science to help model and understand the native advertising space.

In 2012, US marketers spent close to $15B on internet display ads and this number’s only growing. The old banner ad model is a huge chunk of it but it’s being supplanted by better, smarter technologies that provide significantly higher engagement rates. Social networks have embraced native advertising that blends into their products rather than being delegated to a sidebar or a banner that’s immediately ignored. Native advertising is a much better approach and I believe it’s going to take up the majority of display budgets within the next couple of years. TripleLift is doing some incredibly awesome things by allowing publishers to design sites around their content and then easily integrate ads that enhance the user experience rather than disrupt it while advertisers are able to get their ads in front of users that actually enjoy seeing them. It’s an evolution of display advertising that’s better for everyone involved that I can’t see it failing. Clearly I’m excited.

PS. TripleLift is hiring so let me know if you want to talk about the various roles and what we’re doing.