Businessmodel of Quantcast

Customer Segments

Quantcast’s customers primarily comprise advertisers, marketers and publishers that are seeking accurately targeted advertising solutions.

On its website, the Company lists a number of online publishers among its customers, including BuzzFeed, Gawker and The Telegraph.

Other clients include car manufacturer Toyota, stationer Staples, and travel company Royal Caribbean.

Value Propositions

The key value offered by Quantcast is its wealth of browsing data and the processing capabilities of its technology.

The Company uses a combination of real-time machine learning and predictive technologies to analyse data in real time, taking into account user interests, browsing habits and demographic factors, thus providing more thorough and accurate solutions for its clients.

Quantcast also provides a free data collection product, Quantcast Measure, which provides cross-platform audience measurement for mobile apps, websites, platforms and networks.

Channels

Quantcast’s audience tracking product can be accessed free of charge directly from the Company’s website at www.quantcast.com. Access to its advertising solutions and participation in its audience grid service require direct discussion with Quantcast’s sales and marketing team.

Quantcast’s advertising data can also be acquired via various advertising exchanges.

Customer Relationships

Quantcast provides a combination of self-service products and more personalised services. Quantcast’s free audience measurement product is available on a self-service basis and can be used immediately after registration and installation is complete.

Users of the Company’s audience and targeting solutions require a tailored service to suit their individual needs and circumstances, which necessitates a much greater level of direct interaction with the Company. In these cases Quantcast maintains ongoing relationships with many of its clients.

Key Activities

Quantcast provides audience measurement and data analysis services to publishers and advertisers. Through its free Quantcast Measure product it uses pixel tracking technology and browser cookies to process and collect browsing data.

It analyses this data to assess user patterns and profiles, including information pertaining to users’ age, gender, interests, length and frequency of website visits and types of sites visited. It uses this information to provide targeted advertising solutions, allowing publishers and advertisers to tailor content to particular audiences.

Key Partners

Quantcast’s partners are primarily data providers, which provide data across multiple channels, covering television, ownership information, political data, and purchase data, including companies such as TiVo Research, Oracle Datalogix, Kantar Shopcom and Experian, among others. This enables Quantcast to provide more accurate advertising solutions to its marketing clients. Until recently, Quantcast was also a partner of Facebook’s Exchange real-time advertising system where it was able to sell ad inventory, but was one of a number of companies to be let go in 2015.

Quantcast also partners with other companies operating in the digital advertising and analytics space in order to develop more efficient solutions for its clients. This includes partnerships with Israel’s Matomy Group and with tag management and data analytics firm Ensighten. Recently, the Company also launched a partnership with advertising trade association the 4As, under which they will collaborate to provide training and education resources to those within the programmatic advertising sector.

Key Resources

Quantcast’s key resources are its proprietary technology for data collection and analysis and the large amounts of information regarding user internet habits it has gathered. Despite this, there are no US patent applications registered against Quantcast’s name either as applicant or inventor.

The Company’s data and analytics partners are also important resources, helping Quantcast to provide more accurate solutions. In order to manage its data, Quantcast must also maintain reliable and secure IT infrastructure.

Cost Structure

Quantcast’s major costs come in relation to the maintenance of its IT infrastructure and its proprietary technology. This includes operating costs for data centres and the rental of server space.

The Company requires personnel to manage its data partnerships, as well as to maintain and develop its data collection and analysis technology.

Quantcast operates more than 20 offices across North America, Europe and Australia, all of which accrue fixed business costs in the form of rent and utilities.

Revenue Streams

Quantcast generates revenue through the sale of data analysis and advertising inventory. It provides free data collection tools which enable it to track user activity across millions of tagged websites and obtain significant amounts of internet data pertaining to browsing and buying behaviours. The Company’s Quantcast Measure product allows advertisers to create a profile of the types of consumers it would like to target. Quantcast is then able to identify websites that are used by that the target demographics using its data measurement technology, taking a share of the revenue from the resulting ads sold.

Quantcast also uses data to provide targeted advertising solutions directly to publishers, on a cost per impression basis, whereby customers pay per 1,000 views of a particular advertisement, as well as selling ad inventory to advertisers via ad exchanges.