Auctions

Auctions aren’t just for programmatic ads anymore; fashion influencers are turning to Substack; and AI-generated recaps continue to get the facts wrong.

First-price auctions are coming to Google AdSense. The change will go into effect later this year, Google shared in a blog post on Thursday. Google Ad Manager and AdMob have already switched to a first-price auction. Though not nearly as momentous as when Google flipped the switch for Ad Manager, the AdSense change signals that […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by John Donahue, CEO and co-founder of WLxJS. There’s nothing new about performance related incentives in media buying relationships between advertiser and agency. The former enjoys stretched targets and guarantees, the latter […]

Programmatic auction dynamics can be arcane, even for the most technical among us. Google has Open Bidding (nee Exchange Bidding), Amazon’s got Transparent Ad Marketplace (TAM) and Prebid predates them both, not to mention a host of other wrappers on the scene. But what do buyers, exchanges and publishers have to say – and, more […]

Did Facebook’s algorithm force the Clinton campaign to pay more for ads than the Trump outfit during the 2016 US presidential election? That’s fake news, said Facebook, which provided a rare public statement on the dynamics of its ads auction on Tuesday after claims of discriminatory pricing. Senior Facebook exec Andrew Bosworth disclosed on Twitter […]

In-app header bidding is coming to MoPub. On Tuesday, the Twitter-owned mobile ad exchange started testing an advanced bidding solution to replace the app ads waterfall with a unified auction. Roughly a dozen publishers are testing the solution. The closed alpha test does not have a set end date. Until now, advertisers could buy MoPub […]

Susan Athey will speak at AdExchanger’s PROGRAMMATIC.IO conference in San Francisco on April 14. Academia has a unique role to play in supporting the digital economy, as its members bring a completely different perspective to studying ad auctions. The academic underpinning of ad auctions isn’t new – Hal Varian, Google chief economist and early AdWords designer, […]

Supply-side platforms (SSPs) such as OpenX, Rubicon Project and PubMatic are under heavy pressure to increase value for publishers who pay a premium to use their technologies. “The fact that SSPs are positioned on the sell side after much of the transaction value has been extracted by other intermediaries puts more pressure on their margins […]