The last note ended on a quiet moment: the first time AdControl ran on a real publisher's service without us in the loop. An advertiser booked a campaign, the publisher approved it, and it went live. Nobody contacted us. It was almost anticlimactic — but that quiet was the whole point. Demand that used to leak away, because there was no way to actually run it, was finally turning into real campaigns.
Those moments started to add up. Over time, more than a hundred services adopted AdControl and began running direct ads in their own way — large platforms, small apps, one-person studios, interest-based communities. Different in category and size, but the shape that kept repeating was the same: an advertiser books, the publisher approves, and the system handles the rest.
That naturally led to the next question: does this pattern hold in other markets?
What we saw first
What we saw first was one market: Korea. The customers we met were Korean teams, and the problem we watched most closely was here. But even within that single market, the publishers looked quite different from one another — big platforms, small apps, solo-run services, interest-based communities. Different categories, different sizes, different team structures.
And yet the place they got stuck was strikingly similar. The inquiries come in, the traffic is there, and there are users an advertiser would want to reach. The problem was always what came next: sorting out which inventory you can sell, setting a price, checking the schedule, collecting the creative, delivering the campaign, and then handling the report and the settlement once it's done. Without that process in place, an inquiry rarely became a real campaign — someone had to hold the whole thing together over email and spreadsheets.
That's why so many teams wanted to sell direct ads but kept putting it off. It wasn't that the demand was missing. It was that there was no operational structure to catch it.
What we built wasn't just features
At first, we described AdControl as a bundle of features too: an ad server, a booking page, creative review, targeting, reporting, settlement — the ad-operations pieces a publisher would struggle to build alone, offered in one place. That wasn't wrong. They're all genuinely necessary.
But watching how customers actually used it shifted our thinking. What we'd built wasn't a handful of features. It was the flow that carries an ad inquiry all the way to a live campaign: an advertiser sees the inventory and books, the publisher reviews and approves, the campaign ships on schedule, performance shows up in the console, and when it wraps, it rolls into reporting and settlement.
Once that flow lived inside the product, work that used to be held together by hand got much simpler. An ad inquiry didn't have to end as one more email — it could actually become a campaign.
Why we started looking at the next market
We started thinking about going abroad not because we assume what worked in Korea will obviously work elsewhere. If anything, it's because we don't know yet. But the more we looked at the problem we'd seen here, the less it seemed like a specifically Korean one.
Plenty changes from market to market, of course — privacy rules, payment methods, how contracts and invoices get handled, how advertisers find publishers, how agencies operate. But the actual work of running direct ads may not differ that much: organizing your inventory, managing the schedule, collecting creative, approving, showing results, settling. Without that process, an inquiry stalls before it ever becomes a campaign, in any market.
Korea was simply where we could see this problem most closely. It was hard to conclude the problem itself was Korean. Maybe what we saw wasn't one country's problem, but an operational one that almost any publisher runs into the moment they start selling their own ads.
What we don't know yet
From here on, there's still a lot to find out. In Korea, more than a hundred services adopted AdControl and started running their own ads. Advertisers book, publishers approve, campaigns run — that structure actually worked. That part isn't a hypothesis anymore.
But outside Korea, we don't yet know which publishers will feel this problem first, or most acutely. It could be mobile apps, niche communities, local media, or SaaS with an audience of their own. It could even be a type of service we haven't thought of yet. The demand you can turn into direct ads is probably in a lot of places — but where it surfaces first and most strongly, we can't say yet.
The order we expect could be wrong. A much smaller team might feel the need first, or a publisher that already has an ad org might move faster. So we want to keep a record of this part now — not tidy it up after the answer is in, but write down, while we still don't know, what we're looking at and what we're assuming.
Building it in the open
We're going to start meeting publishers outside Korea, to see for ourselves whether this is really a problem that repeats across markets or just one that showed up unusually clearly here. It might work, or it might not. The segment we expect could be right, or completely wrong.
Either way, we want to keep building this in the open — recording not just the wins, but the wrong assumptions, the calls we change, and the reactions we didn't see coming. That record might help someone looking at the same problem, and we think it'll keep us honest with ourselves too.
So we'd like to ask
This note is closer to a question than an answer. If you're building a service outside Korea, or you've run ads directly yourself, we're curious: does this story feel familiar? Or does it feel like something particular to the Korean market?
More specifically, we'd love to know:
- When you run ads directly, what takes the most time? Pricing, booking, sourcing creative, reporting, or settlement.
- Is there any ad-operations work you still handle over email or spreadsheets?
- If you're a publisher, what's the hardest part of running ads directly right now?
We're only just starting to look at the next market. Maybe we'll find this problem doesn't travel as far as we thought. Or maybe we'll find it's far wider than we imagined. Either way, we'll keep writing as we learn.