Yahoo!’s Right Media is announcing today new publisher controls for real-time bidding (RTB) on display ad inventory through its exchange. The company says controls include:
“Inventory opt-in: Sellers can choose the specific types of their inventory they wish to offer via real-time bidding. (The default setting is to opt out of RTB.)”
“Reserve Prices: To help manage sales channel conflict, sellers can set reserve prices for different types of inventory sold on specific channels, and set specific reserve prices for both RTB and non-RTB buyers.”
Read more on the Right Media blog here.
Ramsey McGrory, Head of Right Media Exchange, discussed a bit more about today’s announcement and its implications.
AdExchanger.com: Just to recap from a buy side perspective, real-time bidding is now available through Right Media Exchange and it has been available for a while. Correct?
RM: It has been available for a while. Q1 of last year we announced the DSP (Demand-Side Platform) pilot. Part of that was holding company agencies were getting access to real-time bidding (RTB). The intent there was – from the Yahoo! perspective – to use those significant agency relationships as a way to evaluate what had to be done with RTB from a feature/functionality perspective and actually get “water” going through the pipes.
The “plumbing” has been there for about two and a half years and the DSP pilot is where we’ve really started to ramp it. Last year, we started to surface inventory. Then, we figured out all the problems on the publisher side. At the same time, the buyers were figuring out all of their problems.
For example, it’s very difficult for a DSP or an agency trading desk to consistently respond to 35,000 QPS (queries per second) no matter the stated SLA (service level agreement) because their infrastructure may not be able to handle that load or they may not have enough data to have a point-of-view on all of the different inventory.
In the last year and a half, both the buyer and seller sides have been trying to figure out, “How do you actually make RTB viable?” Due to the underlying technology, it’s actually pretty expensive to do real-time bidding relative to normal ad serving.
Let’s talk about the publishers. In your blog post, you talked about the controls put in place for the publishers in the RTB-enabled exchange. Who are the publishers in Right Media Exchange today?
As it relates to RTB, we have received confirmation from Yahoo itself, and then we have 350 seat holders on Right Media overall. Some of those are publisher aggregators, ad networks and DSPs. Some are publishers themselves. And, sometimes they have a direct seat and sometimes they’re coming in through a partner who has done the integration with Right Media.
Regarding overall RMX inventory. How much of that is RTB enabled?
The whole exchange, which is 10 to 11 billion transactions a day, could be cleared via RTB. The infrastructure is there to do it all.
We tend to moderate the QPS (queries per second) on a seat basis based on how much a buyer can consume while still being able to respond in a reasonable timeframe.
Is RTB‑enabled media, through Right Media, is this just for standard IAB graphical display, or are there other formats online today?
It’s generally IAB standard graphical display, because people are looking for scale. It would be hard to do RTB on a unit that was non‑standard, because you’d never be able to scale the queries‑per‑second.
Can you do expandables on Right Media?
Yes, people can do expandables. It’s an option in Right Media. A publisher chooses to allow for a more intrusive ad experience in an auction environment – totally up to them.
There are some publishers who say, “Yes, I generate a 50 percent yield over the standard ads, and I’m willing to do it.” And others say, “I going to have my direct sales people sell it, because I think the value is much higher than what I’m getting.”
By John Ebbert
