From Thailand to the US, a startup wants to redefine mobile advertising

For content creators like bloggers, chasing after ad revenue to fund their work is as much a concern as the empty white page in front of them. Both can be equally terrifying, especially for someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. AdsOptimal’s service probably can’t do much about the empty white page issue, but it can help with the ads.

Founded by Thai developer and entrepreneur Brad Phaisan, AdsOptimal provides support for ads on content sites. It makes a plug-in that offers website owners the infrastructure to place ads and optimize them for mobile. The idea is that the site owner can decide on the ad they want and then forget about it. Optimization, placement, even partnerships with ad providers, everything is taken care of by AdsOptimal.

Journey to the west

Phaisan made his first money from ads online when he was just 12 years old, back in his native Thailand. It was the time before Y2K, when the internet was still evolving in its primordial online sea. “I built a website and the first cheque I made was for US$13, sent from the US to Thailand,” he tells Tech in Asia. From then on, programming became his calling. It led him to a silver medal in the 2004 International Olympiad in Informatics in Athens, Greece, and the gold trophy in Microsoft’s 2007 Imagine Cup competition in software design.

That last accolade became the ticket to the US for Phaisan. He worked for Microsoft and Google, a company whose vision had inspired him from his early days online. Deciding to take the plunge and start his own company was easier said than done, though. When you’re an immigrant in the United States, with limited visa privileges, and your command of the language isn’t the best, it’s not so much a plunge as a dive from a cliff while blindfolded.

“When you move to a country where you don’t have friends, family, [local] education, it’s really difficult to get someone to mentor you, to teach you,” Phaisan says. His tactic was to approach people as much as he could, joining hackathons, meetups, and competitions, and letting his skills speak for him. “The best way to [draw] more attention [to myself] was to do something that people had never seen before,” he adds. In his case, it was the speed with which he could develop working apps.

Joining US startup bootcamp Y Combinator was the turning point for him to found AdsOptimal, Phaisan says (disclosure: Y Combinator is also an investor in Tech in Asia. See our ethics page for details). “They had a lot of advice, a legal team, funding; everything I needed to leave my full-time job and start my company,” he says. At the time, the fund was looking for teams to invest in, without a fully formed idea. The idea for AdsOptimal was born during that time.

Taking on Google

AdsOptimal’s promise is to increase the ad revenue a content creator gets on his or her website on web and mobile. The service differentiates itself from mainstream services like Google’s in that it provides a complete, curated experience that requires little technical know-how on the user’s end. “We’ve been hearing a lot from our customers that when they sign up for an account with Google, and they put an ad on their website, no one is there for them to help them make it better,” Phaisan says. AdsOptimal’s service includes support, ad optimization, ad placement, and integration into the user’s website.

In return, the company shares some of that revenue with the website owners/publishers. “That has been really the ad businesses’ simplest business model, since the early days,” Phaisan remarks. The company considered charging a flat fee to license its service, but thought that wouldn’t be fair. “I feel like if we could not make [our customers] money, we should not get money either. That’s why we go fully for revenue sharing,” he adds.

It’s no surprise that AdsOptimal wants to focus more on mobile, with so much of the global internet traffic going through mobile devices. Mobile ad spending is projected to surpass US$100 billion in 2016, accounting for 50 percent of all digital ad expenditure. At the same time, the company is looking to improve the online ad experience in general. “We think that the ad doesn’t have to look like a rectangular banner,” Phaisan says. “We are also working on how to make a better ad that integrates seamlessly to a website, so it doesn’t look like an ad. It doesn’t look like a promotion or coupon. It can fit seamlessly to their content.”

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