Platform-A (Advertising.com) has quietly turned live Bidplace, which got some press back in September 2008. (a current news search on Google for “bidplace” currently produces no results) The product manager for Bidplace SB comments on the product in the posting above as follows:

- The “SB” in BidPlace SB stands for “Small Business”. BidPlace SB is a self-service tool for smaller advertisers who are looking to spend anywhere from $300 – $15K per month on display advertising.
- You guessed correctly – BidPlace SB is offering direct access to the 90% reach of the Platform-A / Advertising.com network.
- BidPlace SB lets users target by geo (at the state or DMA level) as well as by site content (26 categories to choose from). We’ll also be offering demographic targeting in March.
- We’ve launched with CPM pricing, and soon we’ll also offer CPC bidding.

By the way, Platform-A will also be releasing BidPlace Professional later this year. That product will be geared towards larger advertisers who want a combination of self-service and account support.

The platform at first glance looks less like an ad exchange, and more like a self-service ad platform that simply plugs in campaigns into the existing Ad.com network, attempting to cater to smaller buyers who want to purchase display ad inventory. Starting out as a CPM model, it biases towards higher CPMs and less transparency on pricing. The typical bid-based ad exchange model benefits buyers by running a second-price impression auction, where advertisers set a ceiling average bid and then paying the second highest price + 0.01 CPM. This means that the publisher doesn’t get all the “surplus” in the transaction, and the market is more competitive.

We will play around with the platform and provide some more comments later, but for now it still looks pretty fresh, new and will probably have its issues, for example in the help section:

There is no minimum contract length in BidPlace SB – you can pause your campaigns any time you want. A minimum daily spend of $10 is required. BUT:

Why am I being charged more than my daily budget on some days?
To ensure maximum reach, we may allow more impressions on certain days, based on the day-to-day fluctuation in traffic on our partner sites. Because of this, you might find your campaign being charged more than your daily budget on some days. However, your monthly bill will never exceed your daily budget times the number of days in that month.

So it seems, you can spend as little as $10 a day, except you should be willing to spend $300 in a day just in case. It remains to be seen how small business react to a more uncertain budget plan such as this.

We do expect to see this platform improve, and hopefully APIs, cookie-based retargeting, proper frequency capping and other goodies are in the planning stages too…