Datacratic Launches RTBkit, Real-Time Bidder Framework

Datacratic, a software company that applies real-time machine learning and predictive modeling to big data generated from consumer behavior, recently launched a real-time bidder framework for Rubicon Project, Nexage, App Nexus, The Google (News - Alert) Ad Exchange and other advertising exchanges. 

RTBkit takes much of the hard engineering work out of creating a Real-Time Bidder for online advertising. Its open, service-oriented architecture can be used to assemble a bidder as simple or as complex as desired.

The RTBKit core connects to ad exchanges via Exchange Connectors and routes bid requests and data through a configurable set of components which can be extended to implement a customized bidder.

The open-source software package is implemented as a set of C++ services which run on Linux and communicate with each other using ZeroMQ, and which expose a set of REST APIs for monitoring and configuration. It is highly optimized and can deal with 20,000 bid-requests per second on a single server.

 “This is an exciting milestone for Datacratic, and for programmatic advertising as a whole, because it represents the beginning of an open source community movement,” said James Prudhomme, Datacratic’s CEO. “Through the collaborative efforts of software engineers around the world we will witness massive innovation in the real-time marketing ecosystem.”

 “Our intention is to help RTBkit gain traction among developers and to become the go-to framework for real-time bidding,” said Nicolas Kruchten, Datacratic’s Head of Product Engineering. “We are excited about collaborating with other software engineers to improve upon the initial code base. At Datacratic, we see this as a benefit to all players in the ecosystem.”

Service discovery is provided by Apache Zookeeper and basic reporting via Graphite.

 “At Datacratic, we believe that open ad exchanges have great potential but are inefficient due to low bid density and poor optimization,” added Jeremy Barnes, Datacratic’s CTO and cofounder. “Before RTBkit, the cost of building a bidder was prohibitive. RTBkit will enable a flourishing ecosystem of smarter bidders.”