prebid

The alternative ID landscape is incredibly fragmented. So how are publishers – especially long-tail publishers that tend to be strapped for tech resources – supposed to pick the ID solutions that work best for them?

In 2022, SPO solutions largely revolved around creating direct connections to so-called premium publishers. But machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) also took on a bigger role in SPO this year. And 2022 was the year the ad industry began touting SPO as the solution of choice for sustainability-focused marketers.

UK-based publisher LADbible Group is testing post-cookie alternatives and building its contextual targeting capabilities. But the social-first publisher has yet to be convinced that any of these alternatives will be a truly viable replacement for the much-maligned – and yet still widely used – third-party cookie.

Google Ad Manager (GAM) was out of commission for about three hours Thursday evening across web, app and video inventory. Any ad placement served through GAM, even ads monetized by a non-Google SSP, went dark, leading to lost revenue for publishers of all sizes at a time when they can least afford to lose out on revenue.

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.

Kevel launched a new set of APIs on Thursday, called Relay, for publishers and their ad tech partners to build their own programmatic stacks. Kevel’s overarching vision is to provide an AWS cloud-like infrastructure to support online advertising. The purpose of Relay, specifically, is to help publishers get more innovative with their programmatic monetization strategy.

A lot of ink has been spilled about the value of a publisher’s first-party data, but publishers can’t effectively monetize their data programmatically if they don’t have a standardized way to categorize it. On Monday, ArcSpan released Contextual APP, a data processing tool that enables publishers to structure their first-party contextual data into salable audience segments, including seller-defined audiences, using the IAB Tech Lab’s content and audience taxonomies.

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.

Google’s decision to delay third-party cookie deprecation until 2023 came the day before Salon CRO Justin Wohl’s wedding. Salon had converted its ad business to an open-web programmatic model a few years earlier, so the brief reprieve from signal loss came as a huge relief and another reason to pop some champagne. Since then, Wohl has been laying the groundwork for effective post-cookie monetization on the open web.