The ‘The Sell Sider’ Category
"The Sell-Sider" is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.
Rajeev Goel is CEO of PubMatic, a publisher yield optimization company.
With the development of so many sophisticated technical solutions to help online publishers minimize the risk of running malware and ads delivered to the wrong person at the wrong time in the wrong place, it is hard to believe that we still see the unwanted and often ugly teeth whitening and belly fat ads on top 100 websites.
The challenges that publishers face when trying to protect their brand from unwanted ads, malware, channel conflict and other issues that affect their ad revenue and user experience aren’t going away any time soon. In many cases, they are even growing. However, publishers can better protect themselves by having a good understanding of “bad ad” trends and what are the best solutions to prevent them.
You may remember not too long ago malware made headlines because it moved away from smaller, less-known sites and hit the mainstream – even the New York Times was affected by it. How does it happen? It varies. In the case of the New York Times, malware slipped through their direct sales force when an advertiser pretended to be someone they weren’t. Malware typically hits publishers the hardest at the beginning of the quarter – that’s when media budgets are the weakest and malware perpetrators can buy inventory from publishers at the lowest possible rate.
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"The Sell-Sider" is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.
Ben Barokas is Chief Revenue Officer of AdMeld, a publisher yield optimization company.
The Publisher vs. Ad Network thread is among the industry's oldest and most provocative. There's been a requisite panel about it at nearly every conference over the past few years, and just when the debate seems to simmer down, another flare-up puts it back on everyone's radar. Technology is bringing change, but strategy and policy is a big part of the solution. Here are a few suggestions to help publishers navigate these waters:
- Develop an inventory management strategy and socialize it across your entire organization.
Practices like selling the same inventory simultaneously on multiple exchanges are open invitations to arbitrageurs and can be deadly to your bottom line without the proper approach and analytics.
- The world has enough "blind" inventory. The value of inventory without provenance or context is essentially zero, and networks won't buy it. If you choose to sell blind on an exchange, maintain pricing discipline by setting floors across categories and audiences.
- Demand transparency. Ask your networks for an advertiser list for what they're running right now, and if you're using RTB, ask your technology partner. Not enough publishers do this, and it fosters more business and better relationships.
- Stop the reselling. Advise your networks that if they don't have the demand, it is NOT ok to source demand from other networks, especially via the exchanges. This is your best route to eliminating low-quality creative and malware.
I'd be remiss if I didn't say it: yield optimizers have gone a long way towards smoothing these relationships and simplifying transactions. Many of the publishers still grappling with these issues would benefit from engaging one. As the landscape becomes more complex, it pays to have a partner that can apportion your inventory correctly and has the relationships and technical capabilities to aggressively enforce your business rules.
Follow AdMeld (@admeld) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
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"The Sell-Sider" is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.
Alanna Clark is Director of Business Development at AdMeld, a publisher yield optimization company.
Three-day weekends, holiday seasons, a plethora of Q1 inventory. These are all normal signals and events throughout the course of our year but also triggers for more unseemly activities, namely malvertising.
The digital advertising space has always had its share of bad actors. But as the ecosystem has grown in size and complexity, so has the cunning of those who use it to spread malware. Malware puts consumers in danger, wastes the industry's time, and sucks billions from the world economy. Until recently, speaking openly about these issues was taboo—especially for those companies that didn't want to risk being branded as 'malware infested.' This kind of attitude has led to the perpetuation of two major malware myths:
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"The Sell-Sider" is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.
Tom Shields is CEO of Yieldex, a publisher yield optimization company.
Let me be the first to introduce you to the hot new TLA (three-letter acronym) for 2010: RTS. 2009 brought you RTB done by DSPs. On the other side, we've just been introduced to SSPs, so that means they should do - you guessed it - Real-Time Selling!
I am only partly joking here. As I've written before, RTB continues to skew the power in favor of the buyers. A healthy ecosystem requires a balance of power between buyers and sellers. To help restore the balance, publishers need a complementary system - an SSP - and part of what an SSP should provide is real-time selling.
So, what is real-time selling? We define it as the ability for sellers to set floor prices in real time to make sure they're getting full value for their inventory, in the same way buyers can set bids in real time based on available information at the time of the impression request.
One of the major selling points of DSPs is they can incorporate information from many sources - agency and advertiser data, third party providers, and the publishers themselves - and use it to decide how much an impression is worth. Somewhat less obvious is that the worth of the impression is actually just a ceiling on what the buyer is willing to pay, and sophisticated bid management programs often bid much lower in an attempt to get the impressions for the lowest value. This means the publisher may get much less than the buyer would have been willing to pay.
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"The Sell-Sider" is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.
Tyler Fitch is Director of Ad Network Sales at hi5 Networks, Inc., a social media website.
I know the AdMeld Partner Forum in NYC a couple of weeks ago has been mentioned multiple times already, but I wanted to give it some more love anyway. The conference was fantastic, sporting almost all of the top minds in the real-time bidding (RTB) space. The one thing that I didn't like though was the absence of discussion about SSPs (Sell-Side Platforms) for publishers. Later, at the after-party, I made it a point to walk up to each DSP and ask, "What can you do for me!?"
One may wonder, "Why should DSPs even consider building an SSP?" That's easy: they are missing out on 50% of the revenue. Ad exchange models currently charge both the buyer and the seller. Even if DSPs served 100% of all impressions they would only be making 50% of the revenue. Well…. ...unless DSP's use the new technology to find another way to arbitrage CPMs… which of course they would never do. 
This brings me to my next point, RTB doesn't do much good at all (or might even have a negative effect) for publisher CPMs. RTB allows advertisers to buy on an even more effective dCPM (dynamic CPM) than is offered on non-RTB exchanges.
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"The Sell-Sider" is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.
Tom Shields is CEO of Yieldex, a publisher yield optimization company.
Google's release of the DoubleClick Ad Exchange 2.0 has introduced Real-Time Bidding (RTB) to a much wider audience, While they were not the first, they are probably the biggest, and their entry is starting to legitimize RTB as more than just a niche.
Neal Mohan's introductory blog post
(see it here) emphasizes the three main principles behind the development of their exchange: simplify the system for buying and selling, deliver better performance, and open up the ecosystem. It's this last point - openness - that I'd like to explore.
Real-time bidding offers some openness for the buyers: they are delivered each impression, with the floor price, URL, and cookie, and have a fixed amount of time to bid. They are then notified if they win and a request is made to deliver the advertisement. What's surprising is that unlike a standard auction, at eBay for example, if they lose, the potential buyer has no idea what the winning bid was. Google gets to keep all that information.
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"The Sell-Sider" is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.
Tom Shields is CEO of Yieldex, a publisher yield optimization company.
The new real-time bidding (RTB) exchanges seem to skew the buying power further in favor of buyers. They can see each impression in real-time, data-enhance it with their own data, and then bid on it. The problem is that most publishers don't know where the pockets of value exist in their remnant inventory, so they can't intelligently allocate that inventory in a way that makes them the most revenue.
Publishers need 3 things to maximize the value of their inventory on an exchange:
1. Inventory value. Publishers need to get back from their exchanges the value of their inventory, on an impression-by-impression basis. Just getting high-level average CPMs by section or zone isn't good enough, this masks the high-value impressions that may exist within those sections.
2. Third-party data. Your buyers are using data to understand the value of your inventory, you need to have the data to fight back. You should be setting floors on your inventory based these data segments, so buyers can't just cherry-pick your inventory at an overall low value, and you can't do this without the data.
3. An analytic system to maximize yield. You will need a system that can capture an analyze all this data - terabytes of it - and spit out a set of floor prices by inventory segment. In an ideal world, this system operates in real-time, re-setting floors based on the most recent data. I call this real-time selling - the antidote to real-time bidding.
Not all of these items are easily attainable. The first item is not generally available from exchanges, so publishers need to demand it. The second is becoming more available, from vendors such as Audience Science, BlueKai, and eXelate. The third will be provided by Yieldex, among others. Forward thinking publishers, who put this stack together, should be able to dramatically increase revenue from their unsold inventory.
Follow Tom Shields (@tshields), Yieldex (@yieldex) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger.com) on Twitter.
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"The Sell-Sider" is a new column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.
Michael Barrett is CEO of AdMeld, a publisher yield optimization company.
There’s been a lot of interesting talk over the past few weeks about the potential impact of Google Ad Exchange. While there seems to be consensus that the platform will catalyze the adoption of real time bidding and the exchange model in general, most of the analysis (as noted by FarneyMedia) has been from and about the buy side. But from AdMeld’s perspective, I’m most interested in the role AdEx may play in the lives of our clients—the web’s premium publishers.
Like most things Google, AdEx brings to bear some smart technical features. For instance, by connecting the exchange with DFP, Google’s built a nice onramp into the platform for large publishers. That kind of convenience is important, but it’s just one part of the equation. For AdEx or any exchange to succeed, it will have to demonstrate superior monetization capabilities on the sell side. That means delivering the highest possible yield for every impression at 100% fill, and doing it better than the top players in the space. As Mike Cassidy of Undertone said recently, “publishers are better off selling through multiple channels than one transparent channel at lower rates.”
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