Software Engineering Daily

Moat is one of the most successful advertising technology companies in history. After building a business from measurement of ad impressions, Moat was sold to Oracle for $850 million.

Advertising powers the free content on the Internet. Measurement makes it easier for publishers to monetize their content. At Software Engineering Daily, we know this from firsthand experience. The podcast ecosystem has barely any ability to measure success–and that can make it hard to entice advertisers. In podcasting, it is very difficult to understand if an advertising campaign is a success.

This illustrates why Moat is important. Improving the analytics on advertising helps publishers, brands, ad agencies, and adtech companies decide how to allocate their capital.

Why is it hard to measure advertising success? Why is this a difficult engineering problem? Because there are so many players in the space with conflicting incentives.

A brand wants to show ads to people who will buy a product. A publisher wants to display an ad that will maximize revenue. Adtech companies and ad agencies want to take the biggest cut possible from the transactions between brands and publishers. In the midst of all of this, fraudulent traffic providers offer cheap services that drain money from anyone who is not keeping a close eye on their deal flow.

In this fog of war, Moat’s goal is to provide transparency where possible. Moat CEO Jonah Goodhart joins this episode to talk about advertising analytics, viewability, and fraud.

If you like this episode, we have done many other shows about adtech and advertising fraud. You can check out our back catalog by going to softwareengineeringdaily.com or by downloading the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS, where you can listen to all of our old episodes, and easily discover new topics that might interest you. You can upvote the episodes you like and get recommendations based on your listening history. With 600 episodes, it is hard to find the episodes that appeal to you, and we hope the app helps with that.

Who do you use for log management? I want to tell you about Scalyr, the first purpose built log management tool on the market. Most tools on the market utilize text indexing search, which is great… for indexing a book. But if you want to search logs, at scale, fast… it breaks down. Scalyr built their own database from scratch: the system is fast. Most searches take less than 1 second. In fact, 99% of their queries execute in <1 second.  Companies like OKCupid, Giphy and CareerBuilder use Scalyr. It was built by one of the founders of Writely (aka Google Docs). Scalyr has consumer grade UI, that scales infinitely. You can monitor key metrics, trigger alerts, and integrate with PagerDuty. It’s easy to use and did we mention: lightning fast. Give it a try today. It’s free for 90 days at softwareengineeringdaily.com/scalyr.

Toptal is the best place to find reasonably priced, extremely talented software engineers to build your projects from scratch or scale your workforce. Get a free pair of Apple Airpods when you use Toptal.com/sedaily to work with an engineer for at least 20 hours.

We know that monitoring can be a challenge…with so many services, apps, and containers to track, it’s harder than ever to understand application performance, and troubleshoot issues. Built by engineers, for engineers, Datadog is a platform that’s specifically designed to provide full-stack observability for modern applications. Datadog helps dev and ops teams easily see across all their servers, containers, apps, and services to monitor performance and make data-driven decisions. Datadog integrates seamlessly to gather metrics and events from more than 200 technologies, including AWS, Chef, Docker, and Redis. With built-in dashboards, algorithmic alerts, and end-to-end request tracing, Datadog helps teams monitor every layer of their stack in one place. But don’t take our word for it—start a free trial today & Datadog will send you a free T-shirt! Visit softwareengineeringdaily.com/datadog to get started. 

If you want to start a podcast, check out Podsheets. Podsheets is a product we built to create and manage podcasts. We are podcasters ourselves–and we understand the difficulties of getting started. Podsheets makes it easy to post your episodes and distribute them to iTunes and Google Play with a single click. If you are curious about podcasting, but have no idea where to start, Podsheets will guide you through the process. With Software Engineering Daily, we have been producing 5 shows a week for 2 years. We understand recording, we understand how to produce your show and we understand how to get advertisers. We want to help you with this process. Check out Podsheets today. We will give you everything you need to create and manage your podcast–and if you have any questions or you get confused, you can always contact us directly for help. Podcasting is as easy as blogging–let us show you how to podcast, with Podsheets.