Tremor Video bet on the few seconds you wait before an online video starts. That pre-roll slot was where TV ad budgets were moving, and Tremor helped brands buy it, place it and prove it worked. When the New York company went public in June 2013, YouTube and online video were exploding, and advertisers wanted the same kind of audience numbers they got from television. Tremor promised to deliver them through its own software.

From Banners to Pre-Roll

Tremor was organized in 2005. At first it delivered video ads both inside banner spaces on web pages and inside video streams. Over time it shifted to in-stream ads, the kind that play before or during a clip. In late 2010 it bought ScanScout, another video ad company. The bet was that brands would pay more for ads people actually watched, and that software could match each ad to the right viewer.

Selling Half, Keeping Half

Tremor priced 7.5 million shares at $10 in June 2013 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange as TRMR. Ad tech stocks soon fell out of favor. In 2017 Tremor sold its business that worked for advertisers and kept the side that served publishers, renaming itself Telaria. In April 2020 Telaria merged with Rubicon Project. That June the combined company took a new name, Magnite.

Cover: Earthquake in an Artist's Studio, Pietro da Cortona. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for an earthquake (tremor).