Every significant company is the result of timing, people, and a clear-eyed view of where an industry is going. Collective Audience™ is no different. Our story starts with two companies that each saw part of the picture.

BeOp: The publisher side

BeOp was founded in Paris in 2017 with a radical idea: what if advertising could feel like editorial content? Instead of interruptive banners, what if brands could participate in conversations with readers through Q&A formats, polls, and dialogue?

The insight proved correct. BeOp formats consistently outperformed standard display on every engagement metric, time spent, interaction rate, brand recall. By 2023, BeOp had deployed conversational formats on 200+ premium French and European publishers including Le Monde, Les Échos, and HuffPost.

But BeOp's founders saw a ceiling. The conversational format was solving engagement, but not the underlying data infrastructure problem. Publishers needed first-party data tools. Advertisers needed cookieless targeting. The ecosystem needed a layer that BeOp alone couldn't build.

NYIAX: The marketplace side

NYIAX (New York Interactive Advertising Exchange) was solving a different problem. Founded on the premise that premium advertising inventory should trade like a financial instrument, with guaranteed delivery, transparent pricing, and clean data. NYIAX built premium audience marketplace infrastructure in the United States.

By 2023, NYIAX had relationships with US premium publishers, institutional advertisers, and a cookieless data infrastructure that complemented BeOp's format layer perfectly.

The merger

The combination of BeOp and NYIAX was not a typical tech merger. Both companies shared the same thesis: the open web deserved better infrastructure, with complementary capabilities that, together, created something neither could build alone.

BeOp brought: 200+ publisher relationships, conversational ad format technology, and deep European market knowledge.

NYIAX brought: premium marketplace infrastructure, cookieless identity technology (what became AudienceMatching), and US market positioning.

The result: Collective Audience, a transatlantic platform with offices in New York (85 Broad St) and Paris (33 rue La Fayette), serving both sides of the publisher-advertiser equation.

What this means for the Open Web

The open web faces an existential threat from walled gardens that capture value at the expense of publishers, readers, and the broader ecosystem. Collective Audience exists to build the infrastructure that keeps the open web viable.

We believe that premium publishers deserve better monetization tools. That advertisers deserve transparent access to engaged audiences. And that readers deserve advertising that respects their attention.

That belief is what brought BeOp and NYIAX together. And it's what drives Collective Audience forward.