The 17 best-paid people in ad tech

Rocket FuelRocket Fuel CEO Randy Wootton features in our ad tech rich list this year.

Ad tech is “having a premature midlife crisis,” according to Digiday, which reports there will be substantial consolidation in the sector in the months to come.

But while a fair amount of negativity is being cast on the industry at the moment, there are plenty of executives with reasons to smile.

This is the second year we have compiled our “ad tech rich list” — a ranking of the best-paid executives that work for ad tech businesses.

This year there are no women in our list. Rocket Fuel has the most-featured executives. And the best-paid ad tech exec had a near $6-million pay cut on the previous year.

Methodology: Our ranking looked at SEC filings, taking account of total annual 2015 compensation, including salary, stock awards, option awards, and other incentives. That’s an obvious flaw because a lot of people on this list hold a lot of their net worth in stock they have accumulated over previous years and through other assets and investments. But we only looked at salary and our rankings start with those who earned $1 million in 2015 or above.

This list is by no means extensive: We chose to look at public companies only, so many big names like AppNexus and OpenX are not in there. We also only looked at pure-play ad tech companies: Otherwise ad tech execs at Google, Oracle, Facebook, Yahoo, and AOL (which acquired Millennial Media, the company with the second best-paid ad tech exec in last year’s rankings) would surely make the list too.