A professor stepped into the hallway so students could use his office to call clients. The office had been a converted closet. In Nate Putnam’s account of his beginnings, this modest exchange of space matters: someone with a room gave it to someone with a business to start. Entrepreneurship can acquire rather expensive scenery. Putnam remembers the chance to call clients and a teacher willing to make room for it.
Today he is the co-founder and CEO of Monumetric, the advertising business based in Farmington, Utah. Its work sits behind the pages people read: helping publishers turn attention into income. The public milestones include an Inc. 5000 appearance in 2019 and a Google publisher story in 2023 describing more than 1,800 independent creators and publishers. Putnam’s recent return to the classroom supplies a smaller, more personal measure of distance traveled.
The assignment that refused to end
Putnam traces the company’s impetus to David Herrmann’s New Venture Growth and Strategy class at Utah State University. Students had to start a company during the semester and see how it performed. He met fellow Monumetric co-founder Kevin Hill while studying for his MBA. Michael Glauser was the professor who surrendered the office. The recollection gives the founding story a useful scale: a course, a colleague, a place to make calls.
A semester has an advantage over the romantic idea of someday. It ends. An assignment to start a business makes indecision expensive in a very ordinary way: the work is due. Putnam’s account emphasizes the push his teachers supplied. The encouragement came with an obligation to try. There is something pleasing about a company surviving the academic calendar that helped set it in motion.
His undergraduate subject was philosophy; his later qualification was an MBA. The combination is an appealing footnote to a career spent asking what numbers mean for people. Advertising produces an abundance of measurements. Choosing which ones deserve attention remains a judgment. A philosophy degree hardly proves a business method, but it adds texture to the biography of an executive whose company makes measurement its trade.
A name with a job to do
The business began in 2012 as The Blogger Network. Its account of those early days describes frustration with ad networks that offered inadequate reporting, disappointing performance, and too few answers. The proposed service put website owners at the center. That origin is practical: publishers already had content and readers, and needed help making the advertising side work.
The old name eventually became restrictive. Some publishers did not call themselves bloggers; some advertisers associated networks with a mixture of desirable and undesirable advertising inventory. Monumetric was the replacement. For a company brokering relationships, a name that makes either party hesitate is a fairly inconvenient introduction.
The new name combines the human ambition of “Monu” with the measurement implied by “Metric.” Its icon refers to Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. An ad business might reasonably have chosen a dollar sign. This one selected a reference to Earth’s small place in the solar system. The association gives its commercial work a broader frame, linking the people who publish information with the people who use it.
Putnam’s business therefore carries two recurring concerns in its identity: people should be able to earn from their work, and the machinery supporting that work should be measured. The tension between those concerns makes his writing interesting.
The friendly letter with teeth
In August 2016, Putnam published an open letter to publishers within an essay about advertising supply and demand. The tone began affectionately and soon became corrective. Publishers, he argued, needed to consider the advertisers buying their impressions. A better rate required attention to the value being sold, including whether an advertisement could actually be seen.
He warned against buying unearned traffic and against filling a page with advertisements merely to extract a little more revenue. He also stressed the importance of keeping both readers and advertisers satisfied. These were arguments about conduct as much as technology. A publisher could damage the market while believing they were simply improving a spreadsheet.
The essay helps explain the kind of advocate Putnam is. Supporting publishers includes telling them when their choices make advertising less useful. A customer paying for an opportunity to reach a reader has a legitimate interest in the reader encountering the ad. That proposition sounds almost embarrassingly straightforward. It becomes less straightforward when every participant has a different number to improve.
The useful distinction in his argument is between charging more and delivering more value. A higher price is an outcome; it gives little instruction about the work needed to earn it. Putnam chose to write about that work.
Revenue helps the publisher keep publishing. Each relationship needs to work.
The giant at both ends of the table
During a September 2016 conversation with Nathan Latka, Putnam described Google as a partner and a competitor. That double role captures the awkwardness of building a specialist service around infrastructure that also offers its own publisher tools. The relationship asks a business to cooperate with an organization whose products may give a prospective customer another route.
Putnam discussed data analysis, optimization, and the earning potential of online content. He described Monumetric as bootstrapped. His advice about ownership was concise: “What you can monetize is what you own.” The wording directs attention toward an asset the publisher controls, a useful concern in an industry where audiences may arrive through somebody else’s platform.
The same interview’s reading list included Start with Why, Reality Check, and Leaders Eat Last. He named Brian O’Kelley as a CEO he followed and Slack as a favorite online tool. These details bring the executive down to a recognizable scale: books, another operator worth watching, and software for talking to colleagues.
They also prevent the career from becoming a parade of company statistics. An advertising founder has to understand auctions and relationships. His interview moved between both.
“I believe in building people.”
Nathan Putnam
Small sites have business problems, too
Monumetric’s service range gives concrete form to the publisher-first premise. Its published program overview starts Propel at 10,000 monthly pageviews and continues through Ascend, Stratos, and Apollo, the latter serving sites above 10 million monthly pageviews. The thresholds require three consecutive months. This is a range of businesses with different demands on the same underlying activity: earning from publishing.
The programs describe work on ad setup, data, and operations. Larger publishers may bring custom systems or direct advertising sales. Smaller ones may be trying to build a full-time business around their websites. A company serving both has to account for differences that a single average would conceal.
For Putnam, this is the operational setting behind the personal mission. Helping somebody publish profitably involves decisions made at the level of a page and an advertising setup. A writer may want to spend the afternoon on a recipe or an explanation. The ad work still needs doing. Managed service is an attempt to give that work a home.
A badge, a list, and the people behind them
In 2019, Monumetric ranked number 4,312 on the Inc. 5000. The listing identified Putnam as its leader and described a business helping publishers meet revenue goals while preserving their sites’ user experience. The recognition belongs to the company. In his career, it marks a business that had moved beyond the classroom assignment into a recorded commercial milestone.
In 2023, Monumetric gained Google Certified Publishing Partner status. The company describes a process involving expertise in Google advertising products, publisher performance, and its relationship with Google. The certification gives an institutional form to a partnership Putnam had discussed years earlier. Google’s own 2023 story placed him alongside co-founder Kyle Ivins and documented the company’s work with more than 1,800 publishers and creators.
documented in Google’s 2023 Monumetric story
There is a useful limit to that number. It describes the company at a particular time, rather than promising a present-day total. Its significance for this profile is the variety of individual businesses behind it. The founding assignment had become a service used by people with work of their own to sustain.
Back through the classroom door
Putnam’s university connection continued beyond graduation. In January 2018, he and Ivins were scheduled for the Huntsman School’s Entrepreneur Leadership Series on growing companies through advertising. The school also lists him on its Founders Board. Those appearances place him inside an ongoing community of entrepreneurs and students.
In September 2026, he coached students at ASC Studio ahead of a business pitch competition. Monumetric had been an early partner of the Analytics Solutions Center, supplying real business data projects and hiring Huntsman students. His aim was personal: to offer the alumni support he once wanted himself.
The connection includes family. He met his wife, Monique, at the university’s Day on the Quad. His description of her retains the cheerful verdict “still way out of my league.” A founder can scrutinize commercial value for years and remain happily mystified by his own good fortune.
That return completes the most revealing circuit in Putnam’s story. A student received room to attempt a business. A CEO now helps students attempt theirs. The borrowed office was a small gesture with a practical consequence. His career gives him a chance to make similar gestures from the other side of the door.