- July 2016 to May 2017
Proper Media is a technology company that provides digital media and advertising software and services. Proper Media's primary product is an ad-serving platform that helps publishers manage their advertising inventory and serve targeted ads to their audience. Proper Media also offers many other products and services, including video advertising, programmatic ad buying, and also owns several content sites.
Proper Media's ad-serving platform helps publishers to manage their advertising inventory and to serve targeted ads to their audience. The platform provides publishers with tools to track ad performance, optimize campaigns, and reporting. The platform also offers many features designed to help publishers maximize revenue, including support for multiple ad units, ad blocking detection, and header bidding.
The owners also owned several properties of their own like TV Tropes, ShareTV, and later, Salon. My time was split between interactive development for those sites and ad-tech development. The most challenging work was ad-tech. It's an industry where you have to stay on the cutting edge because it's constantly evolving due to the amount of money that pours through the industry. Unfortunately, you also have bad actors that exploit this process, which often creates a horrible user experience when redirected to another site or even the app store. This is terrible for the user, but there are companies like Clean.io whose core business is to prevent this.
One of the more significant projects I took on was to build a media player that managed a variety of ad types. With each class, you also have multiple formats like VAST and VPAID. This was my first time building out a video player. I had previously worked with FlowPlayer and built my own, so I understood the browser issues but device limitations were a new challenge. I spent more time than I care to admit trying to solve the IOS in-stream player limitation. I built the initial version of something that I'm sure has long since evolved, but it was a fun challenge.