header bidding

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

Ready, set … sue. On Tuesday, the antitrust division of the Department of Justice formally sued Google over its alleged (ahem) monopolization of the digital advertising market.

SSPs had traditionally been among the first in the ad tech ecosystem to build profitable businesses. But their future in the programmatic tech stack is uncertain because they’ve evolved from publisher-centric technologies to demand aggregation businesses, often competing with their biggest customers: buy-side platforms or DSPs.

My Code, a publisher network that specializes in multicultural media, manages display and video inventory across nearly 800 sites under its umbrella. Because of the complexity of programmatic sales across such a diverse portfolio of sites, including a mix of owned and third-party clients, My Code has relied on PubMatic’s OpenWrap unified bidding solution for the past two years.

As technology and industry self-regulation converge to make supply and demand path optimization more seamless and efficient, we need a better name to describe optimization across the advertising ecosystem, writes Stephen Johnston, CTO of PubWise. “I’d like to submit for your consideration a new term: advertising logistics.”

What happens when your main monetization partner starts flagging your content as spam? Freecycle turned to header bidding to reduce its reliance on Google AdSense, but the company’s one-person engineering team had trouble managing the header-bidding system and the constant stream of Prebid updates on top of web development duties. So, after a 70% drop in ad revenue, Freecycle handed its digital ad business over to PubWise’s managed service.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Whoop Deduped Open Bidding, Google’s alternative to header bidding that maintains its high take rate, has been in the hot seat since last year, after a state-led antitrust suit revealed the lengths to which Google went to stymie header-bidding adoption.  The Trade Desk cranked […]

The programmatic market continues to boom as marketers shift more of their budgets to digital channels. But despite the incredible scale of this ecosystem, the market is still maturing – and true price discovery and price setting at a level of granularity that reflects true marketplace dynamics can help fill some of those gaps, writes Andrew Casale, president and CEO of Index Exchange.

Publishers that pack their ad servers with hundreds of thousands of line items can go ahead and clear them out: Google Ad Manager is building a connection to Prebid to better support header bidding

Google’s FLEDGE proposal presents an opportunity for a more transparent bidding process. But there are concerns around whether FLEDGE will treat all supply-side platforms (SSPs) equally in programmatic auctions within Google’s marketplace, writes RTB House’s Lukasz Wlodarczyk. Remember Google’s secret Jedi Blue agreement with Meta (formerly known as Facebook)?