Overview

Online dictionary and mobile reference resource

• 50 million unique monthly users worldwide
• 25 million mobile Dictionary.com downloads
• 345 million page views per month

Web site: www.dictionary.com

The Dictionary.com Story

Business Problem

Needed to augment internal sales staff by outsourcing sales of unsold inventory.

Bottom Line

Beanstock Media not only increased remnant ad revenue by nearly a third, but also delivered incremental, premium revenue through high impact campaigns sold to top national brand advertisers.

"Over the years we’ve worked with a lot of vendors and were eager for something different. We were impressed with the Beanstock team’s knowledge, experience and enthusiasm. Betting on them was a smart move. We’ve seen a year-over-year remnant revenue increase north of 30 percent.”

– Tom Sipple, Vice President, Dictionary.com

Dictionary.com is the go-to online source for word meaning and usage. It draws content from 15 proprietary reference sources that have helped define the English dictionary as we know it today. Since its launch in 1995, under the name of Lexico Publishing, its online properties have grown to include Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com as well as mobile applications for the iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and iPad. It is the most-visited online dictionary with more than 3.6-billion words searched annually and 50 million unique monthly users onsite and 10 million on mobile devices.

Dictionary.com has its own successful sales department but has traditionally outsourced the selling of unsold ad inventory to ad networks. In the course of conducting an annual evaluation of remnant advertising needs, they turned to Beanstock Media as their private managed exchange partner. Tom Sipple, VP of Sales at Dictionary.com, explained, “Over the years we’ve worked with a lot of vendors and were eager for something different. We were impressed with the Beanstock team’s knowledge, experience and enthusiasm.” While he was promised and received a higher CPM, he didn’t anticipate the significant amount of premium revenue Beanstock would bring in. As Sipple added, “Betting on Beanstock was a smart move.”

Beanstock Media was accustomed to working as an extension of an internal sales team. Acting as Dictionary.com’s advocate, they were able to deploy proprietary technology and their staff of optimization experts to maximize Dictionary.com’s remnant ad revenue.

Technology

Beanstock Media’s smart “decisioning” technology and sophisticated analysis helped focus their efforts, increasing the yield of Dictionary.com’s inventory. Proprietary technology also made high impact placements more efficient by standardizing larger format ad executions that had previously required customized development from buyers’ and seller’s engineering teams. By eliminating the need for customization and one-off implementation, Beanstock enabled advertisers to place high impact ads with Dictionary.com on short notice, confident that their ads would display properly.

People

Good technology often needs human management for maximum benefit. Beanstock Media manages inventory through a combination of technology and dedicated staff to analyze many dimensions of data for every aspect of demand and supply. By facilitating access to hundreds of high quality demand partners and employing unique strategies for minimizing the gap between exchange buyers’ bid and ask, Beanstock produced significantly better yield for Dictionary.com than any other competing network or service.

Results

Beanstock Media’s combination of technology and people paid off for Dictionary.com. “With Beanstock we’ve seen a year-over-year remnant revenue increase north of 30 percent,” Sipple reported. But the cherry on top was the additional revenue from rich media ads previously inaccessible to Dictionary.com. Beanstock Media was able to bring high impact campaigns to Dictionary.com from national brands such as Comcast, Orlando Tourism, Kohl’s and Major League Baseball. These campaigns are typically worth several times more than remnant in-page ads, and since they take the form of pushdowns, skins, takeovers, interstitials, and overlays, they don’t displace existing ad inventory, resulting in 100% incremental revenue.

“Dictionary.com is a uniquely valuable property,” said Joe Lyons, chief revenue officer at Beanstock Media. “We were able to extend their exposure and reach with thousands of quality brand advertisers that meet the high standards of a top 25 web property like Dictionary.com.”