Nature of Operations

12 Months Ended

Dec. 31, 2019

Organization, Consolidation and Presentation of Financial Statements [Abstract]

Nature of Operations

Nature of Operations

Company Overview

The Rubicon Project, Inc., or Rubicon Project (the "Company"), was formed on April 20, 2007 in Delaware and began operations in April 2007. The Company is headquartered in Los Angeles, California.

The Company provides a technology solution to automate the purchase and sale of digital advertising inventory for buyers and sellers. The Company's platform features applications and services for digital advertising sellers, including websites, mobile applications and other digital media properties, and their representatives, to sell their digital advertising inventory; applications and services for buyers, including advertisers, agencies, agency trading desks, and demand side platforms ("DSPs") to buy digital advertising inventory; and a marketplace over which such transactions are executed.

In the second quarter of 2019, the Company announced the beta program for Demand Manager. Demand Manager helps sellers effectively monetize their advertising inventory through configuration tools and analytics to make it easier to deploy, configure, and optimize Prebid-based header bidding solutions. Prebid is a free and open source suite of software products designed by advertising community developers to enable publishers to implement header bidding on their websites and from within their apps. Together, these features power and enhance a comprehensive, transparent, independent advertising marketplace that brings buyers and sellers together and facilitates intelligent decision making and automated transaction execution for the advertising inventory managed on the Company's platform. See related acquisition of rtk.io described in Note 10-Business Acquisitions.

Advertising inventory takes different forms, referred to as advertising units, including display, audio, and video; is purchased and sold through real-time bidding, which includes (i) direct sale of premium inventory, which the Company refers to as private marketplaces ("PMP"), and (ii) open auction bidding, which the Company refers to as open marketplace ("OMP"); and is accessed by users through different channels, including mobile web, mobile application, desktop, and connected televisions ("CTV"), as well as across various out-of-home channels such as digital billboards.