• by Tyler Loechner  @mp_tyler, June 19, 2014

RealVu, an analytics firm, on Thursday announced the launch of the RealVu Viewable Exchange. As the name suggests, only in-view impressions are tradable on the new real-time bidding (RTB) exchange.

“As viewability becomes a standard, buyers are realizing that finding viewable brand-safe inventory programmatically is a real challenge,” stated Brad Krassner, CEO and founder of RealVu.

RealVu counts an impression as “viewable” if at least 50% of the ad is in-view for at least one second, matching the Media Rating Council’s standard.

RealVu is an MRC-accredited viewability measurement firm, and the launch of this exchange comes a few months after the MRC lifted its advisory on viewability, establishing it as a metric that could be traded against.

Alan Edwards, co-founder and COO of RealVu, explained to Real-Time Daily that RealVu guarantees the ad unit is at least 50% in-view before it's bought, which is significant because that's slightly different than guaranteeing the ad will be “viewable.”

Since the standard definition of “viewability” has time as a factor (one second), RealVu can’t guarantee that the ad will end up being deemed viewable (the consumer could scroll away immediately after the ad is served, for example). However, Edwards claimed buyers will see viewability rates between 80-99% through the new exchange, up significantly from the 51.4% recently reported by Integral Ad Science.

If the publisher allows it, the RealVu exchange also works for below-the-fold inventory. If the users scrolls down the page, once an ad unit becomes 50% in-view, RealVu puts it up for auction on the exchange.

Buyers can access the exchange through RealVu directly and can use Deal IDs through OpenX or Adconductor. The exchange currently supports desktop and mobile display.

The MRC is expected to lift its advisory on using viewability as a currency for video buys on June 30. The standard for video viewability is at least 50% of an online video ad being in-view for two seconds. Edwards said RealVu is in the process of adding video support to the exchange.

Edwards said advertisers are currently able to buy anywhere between 50 and 100 million impressions per month though the exchange, but asserted those numbers will go up in the coming months. Krassner claimed in the release that over 600 publishers, including WorldNow, have joined the exchange.

“The scale is going up every day; it’s doubling month after month,” Edwards claimed. “The more buyers that buy through it, the more publisher give to us, and the more scale we see. The truth it, it really has to do with demand.”

Advertisers do not need to use RealVu as their viewability measurement vendor to tap into the exchange.

Editor's note: The story has been updated to remove a sentence stating that $100 million was being spent per month on the exchange. No financial figures were disclosed; the 100 million number was in reference to the number of impressions.