When Amazon Publisher Services (APS) announced plans to release a Prebid adapter last year, it marked a notable victory for open standards over controlled, proprietary integrations.
Now, Amazon’s promise to support a more collaborative programmatic ecosystem has gotten a little closer to reality: The APS Prebid adapter is available for open beta testing, APS announced Wednesday.
Which means publishers will soon find out what it means to have Amazon Ads demand competing directly with other demand sources in ad auctions – and whether that translates to more revenue.
Embracing the open auction
The idea of Amazon embracing open standards once seemed far-fetched. For years, programmatic header bidding was a battleground of competing technologies and approaches that operated independently from each other.
Prebid and its open-source software emerged as publishers’ preferred choice for an ad auction accessible to all SSPs. But Amazon and Google operated their own ad auctions outside Prebid, where SSPs had to compete on the Big Tech companies’ terms.
The Amazon Ads platform prioritized its header-bidding setups, Transparent Ad Marketplace (TAM) and Unified Ad Marketplace (UAM), where Amazon controls which SSPs can participate.
And Google famously built a header-bidding alternative, Open Bidding, that let it avoid competing directly with other SSPs in Prebid – but also opened it up to antitrust scrutiny from regulators around the globe.
Because these three setups didn’t interoperate, publishers had to run all three auctions in parallel if they wanted to access demand from Amazon Ads and Google, in addition to controlling their Prebid auctions.
But Amazon’s announcement that it would integrate with Prebid signaled that a competitive marketplace could win despite Big Tech companies throwing their weight around. It was also a way for Amazon to distinguish itself from Google.
And, naturally, it was an opportunity for ad industry veterans who’ve long advocated for Prebid’s open-source solution to take a victory lap.
A familiar theme: choice and control
Victory laps aside, today, the promise of more open ad auctions officially turns into a product. APS’ Prebid adapter code is now available via GitHub.
One of Amazon’s main reasons for releasing the adapter was to respond to publisher demand for greater flexibility and interoperability, Scott Siegler, director of Amazon Publisher Services, wrote in a blog post announcing the open beta. Speaking to that demand, he emphasized that publishers don’t need to rework their monetization strategies or redesign their stacks to test the integration.
The APS Prebid adapter plugs directly into a publisher’s existing Prebid.js framework. This setup brings Amazon Ads demand directly into publishers’ Prebid auctions for the first time. It also adds to Prebid auctions demand from more than 60 third-party buyers available through TAM and UAM.
Previously, publishers needed to use Amazon Publisher Services web SDKs to access server-side auctions in TAM and UAM, while also managing a separate client-side Prebid implementation, said an Amazon Ads spokesperson. But with the new Prebid adapter, publishers can access those same cloud-based APS demand paths directly within their Prebid setup.
Plus, reducing the number of parallel ad auctions will help site pages load faster, according to APS.
Meanwhile, APS claims publishers will maintain control over which demand sources are activated and which signals are shared via their Prebid auctions, rather than handing over decision-making to a black box.
The new adapter also makes it easier for publishers to compare the performance and operational benefits of each auction setup, the spokesperson added. Pubs can then choose to partition different inventory segments between each auction path depending on how they perform.
In practical terms, APS is positioning itself as another participant in the Prebid auction rather than a replacement for it. And APS will also continue to supply the infrastructure and insights that underpin the Amazon Ads marketplace.
The APS Prebid Adapter is available in open beta to all publishers globally who use Prebid.js and work with Amazon Publisher Services. Publishers interested in participating can download the adapter from GitHub and work directly with their APS representatives to confirm eligibility and begin implementation.
