Maximising Media: How PubX is changing the game with Founder, Andrew Mole

pubX's Andrew Mole on redressing the balance between publishers and advertisers

In our latest episode, we talk to Andrew Mole, founder and CEO of pubX. Built to address the needs of publishers struggling to optimise advertising revenues, pubX is a dynamic floor pricing tool utilising machine learning to set a unique price for every programmatic auction.

The company is a pioneer of the 'pubtech' sector, providing solutions to help level the playing field for publishers in the face of the advanced, AI-based adtech platforms used by advertisers.  

The genesis of pubX and the pubtech sector

After building and successfully exiting a demand-side platform (DSP), Andrew and pubX co-founder Alex Rosen realised how much pressure publishers were under in the current media ecosystem. Central to their challenges was the lack of investment in technology solutions for the sell side in comparison to the massive volumes of investment in buy-side development. 

They set about talking to publishers to find out more and investigate ways of creating solutions. "We said to publishers: 'Tell us where it hurts. What kind of things would you want to build?' And out of these conversations came a picture that there's a huge amount of data on the sell side, but there isn't the vendor ecosystem to access it." 

"There are huge data issues in real-time bidding. There are billions of programmatic auctions happening and publishers are tackling this by hand. They have static rules, they don't really have tools to help them, they've got to use Excel and they have to check back a week later to see how their strategy has worked out. And on the buy side, everything is done by AI. So we wanted to bring that kind of technology to publishers."

How AI will impact publishers and media buying

Where AI is concerned, we are still in the early stages of development, Andrew believes. While tools such as ChatGPT and the recent emergence of DeepSeek have grabbed media attention, these are just a foundational layer and Andrew argues that it's what can be built on top of them that will really make an impact. 

"How are people using these models to create new technologies, new applications, and solve new problems? These innovations are going to be game-changing in every industry, including ours. 

"There's a lot of intellectual property that could be unlocked and put into these models, that can help publishers be better at what they do, write articles that are more targeted for their audience, and perform better from a revenue perspective. You can also apply these technologies to help buyers place ads, and be better at these things that are decision-led, removing human biases." 

The secrets of pubX's success

The growth and success of pubX over the past few years has been notable. So what's the secret sauce? 

"The key phrase for us is 'modular pubtech'," says Andrew. "We're not adtech, we don't help the buy side in any way. We don't punish the buy side, but we are very publisher focused. The publishers are our customers; if we don't help the publishers make money we don't get paid. We have to get it right, we're taking responsibility for setting prices on billions of dollars of inventory. 

"The other side to this is the modular bit. No one wants to build a tech new stack, they don't want to have to log into something else. We insert seamlessly with what publishers are already doing. We integrate with the majority of header bidding wrappers. We don't want to add more work for the publishers." 

To find out more about what's next for PubTech, Andrew's aims for pubX over the next 12 months, as well as his views on what it's like to be a second-time startup founder, listen to the full episode here. 

You can find the full episode and more on our Life in Digital podcast. To find out more about pubX, visit pubx.ai