Coelius says his company has developed intellectual property in several areas: algorithms that deal with large-scale data and extract insights from it, technology that allows Triggit to process billions of impressions per day, and its user interface for advertisers. The company began to build its current technology in 2009. It received some of its initial funding from founders of Urchin, a company that was acquired by Google.

Coelius says real-time bidding helps advertisers deliver ads more effectively and drives up the prices that publishers can command for their ad inventory.

Seth Levine, a technology investor and managing director at Foundry Group, which recently invested in Triggit, says that real-time bidding is a new technology, and its potential impact isn't yet clear. However, he believes that it promises "pretty groundbreaking" benefits to publishers and advertisers, particularly in cases when publishers have good data on the users of their sites alongside high-value content.

Levine was attracted to investing in Triggit because of the company's ability to scale its technology to process a very large number of advertising impressions. "I don't think all demand-side platforms are created equal, with the same ability to handle the firehose," he says.

"We're getting closer to buying people rather than buying dumb impressions," says Marissa Gluck, founder and managing partner of the Los Angeles-based consulting firm Radar Research. She sees companies like Triggit as part of a growing trend, but adds that real-time bidding requires clever technology to work effectively and efficiently.

Gluck believes that advertisers and publishers will welcome real-time bidding. But while the benefits are clear for advertisers, she says, "the larger question is how they affect publishers." Though companies like Triggit claim to help publishers by increasing their ability to sell inventory that might otherwise go unused, Gluck believes it's too soon to say for sure whether real-time bidding will help publishers make more money.