When I joined CoinDesk, I had no intention of being in the ad business. I was hired as the marketing director and was stepping away from overseeing an advertising business at my previous company. And yet, when I joined CoinDesk, we realized that, of the entire team, I was most qualified to build out the advertising business. Small companies tend to do that.
And so, I went off to figure out what to do to help the business diversify its revenue. CoinDesk was unique because it had a small sales team (our head of events was our sales team) and a lot of monetizable traffic. But, unfortunately, we had no data—this was back when DMPs were hot, and we were told we were too small. So, how were we going to monetize that?