by Scott Moore, Co-founder and CEO

As we wrap up the first month of the new year, I'd like to take a moment to reflect back on 2018. We closed out the year on a high note — graduating from a start-up to a rapidly growing company leading the space — so I wanted to take the time to thank everyone at Ad Lightning for their hard work and commitment and of course our valuable partners for their support.

We have learned a lot about the space since we first launched Ad Lightning in 2016. One of our initial goals was to help combat slow page loads. A report we released in 2017 revealed more than 40% of online ads are larger than industry standards, which slows down websites and annoys users with crawling load times. We worked hard to provide best in case solutions to combat this issue and continue to help our partners alleviate this problem today.

However, while slow page loads remains an evergreen problem for the industry, there is a greater sense of urgency on other fronts. Ad fraud is a $19 billion problem, and malware/redirects delivered through digital ads is a major part of that issue. Over the past two years bad actors have only become more sophisticated and aggressive. Identifying, anticipating and blocking these malicious ads is a role we take pride in at Ad Lightning.

Looking back at 2018, I’m most proud our blocking solution that we released in March. We continue to protect over a billion impressions per day and have earned the trust of some of the world's largest publishers. With our blocking capabilities, in addition to our GDPR and data leakage tools, Ad Lightning now offers the industry’s most comprehensive set of solutions to help publishers and ad exchanges manage programmatic advertising by preventing potentially malicious, offensive or non-compliant ad units from loading on a publisher’s site. GeekWire took notice in this article from June.

Looking into next year, Ad Lightning will be doubling down on our Blocking 2.0 solution that brings stronger malware and redirect protection, decreased latency and extended coverage for more ad servers and native units. We're also exploring new solutions that extend our capabilities in-app and with video.

We ended the year with great press — AdExchanger featured our work with the Amobii fraudsters who were masquerading as the legitimate DSP Amobee and hijacking Claritin ads. They even created fake LinkedIn profiles (that LinkedIn took down after we notified them). If you missed the article, read it here!

And on a personal note, I’m also humbled to announce that we've tripled our revenue over the course of the year — thanks to the loyalty of our satisfied clients and addition of many more — and we continue to rapidly grow. A huge thanks to all our partners in the industry who are taking these challenges as seriously as we do.

It’s going to be another demanding year as we fight against bloated ads, ad fraud, malware and redirects — but I promise we will not be deterred. Looking forward to an exciting, challenging and gratifying 2019.