By 'optimizing' ads, can the Rubicon Project save this newspaper?

This promises to be the Silent Spring for big print media. Already this year we've lost the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Dozens of other papers have been driven to the brink by double-digit losses in circulation and print advertising revenue and an overburden of untenable corporate debt. My beloved L.A. Times, owned by the bankrupted Tribune Co., is bleeding reporters and editors from every orifice, despite the fact that the paper's readership -- online, at least -- is through the roof.

Not surprisingly, the news release from the L.A.-based Rubicon Project promising to help newspapers "find money" online caught my eye, as a flotation device attracts the casual interest of a drowning man. With the Rubicon Project's technology, says Frank Addante, the 32-year-old co-founder and chief executive, newspapers and other "premium news" outlets can increase their online revenue by an average of 60% a year.

Could this be, I wondered, daring to hope, the Secret -- the means by which newspapers finally "monetize" their content? Is this the online oxygen for our asthmatic industry?

Bernice, hold my calls.

Starting in 1997 in his dorm room at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Addante and a group of tech-savvy friends were pioneers in the ad network business (an ad network is a kind of brokerage, placing clients' advertising on publishers' websites). In 2007, Addante formed the Rubicon Project with the same cadre of Web veterans and $22 million in venture capital. The company opened the doors of its techno-hip West L.A. headquarters in April 2008 and since then has blown up to become the third-largest online advertising company in the world -- behind only Google and Yahoo -- as measured by reach, according to the online monitoring firm Quantcast. Rubicon processes more than 35 billion ads a month from 375 ad networks, placing them on more than 14,000 websites, including those of the Washington Post, Newsweek and USA Today (it is currently in discussions with Tribune Interactive).

"We want to be the Visa, the Nasdaq of online advertising," Addante says. By which he means the one-stop shop for publications and ad networks, a network of networks handling ad placement, metrics and billing. "Google controls 22% of online advertising." The rest, he says, is "up for grabs."

Great. That's awesome. Now how are you going to save my newspaper?