Business Insider did an interview with Lon Otremba the CEO of Bidtellect an advertising company that was co founded by John Ferber of Domain Holdings.

Bidtellect is the first open native ad exchange. Native advertising is becoming more popular, I have been playing around with some concepts for publications I own or co – manage. Native advertising can be less intrusive and also has shown to producing higher engagement numbers as opposed to display ads.

From the article:

How did native advertising come about?

After billions of dollars of invested capital and countless hours of engineering, the industry hasn’t been able to overcome the fact that consumers just don’t engage with display ads. And consumers are showing a strong willingness to engage with native ads, particularly when compared with banner ads.

What’s causing the native advertising field to boom now?

People like native ads. And importantly, they’re now scalable. Our cofounder John Ferber also helped found Advertising.com, the display advertising industry’s first exchange and yield-optimization technology company.

After Advertising.com was sold to AOL, John began to see a native advertising marketplace emerge. He recognized some distinct parallels with the display market, and realized that he could do for native advertising what Advertising.com did for display. So he built a sophisticated technology platform that enables advertisers and publishers to efficiently manage all aspects of native advertising.