“I hate the term header bidding,” a friend and industry resource told me over a cold beer. “It’s too catchy—it sounds like another piece of ad-tech buzzword BS.”I’d argue “tagless tech”—the first name I heard in reference to header-based executions—was far worse (and horribly untrue). But my friend’s dislike really…
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Header bidding is a way for publishers to solicit real-time bids from a multitude of programmatic partners on each and every piece of inventory by using the page header within a site's source code. Basically, it’s a convoluted way to bypass the ad server waterfall and ensure inventory is valued…
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You may hear a lot these days (particularly on a header-cheerleading site like this one) about the ad-server waterfall being vanquished like some fairy-tale villain. Well, it’s not entirely gone, and similar to many foes in children’s stories, it wasn’t always such a bad thing—it was simply exploited. In the…
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Back in August of 2016, the Google Webmaster Blog announced that come Jan. 10, 2017, “pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly.” A little cryptic, no? Google was really taking aim at a variety…
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In the relatively brief amount of time since digital publishers have adopted header bidding en masse, the header has become jam-packed with demand partners. With new header solutions being built each day, publishers are now wondering how to manage—from who to let into their header to what criteria is available…
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Last June, a major revenue guy from Medium spoke at AdMonsters’ Ops conference, laying out a fascinating native advertising model transacted on a time-spent basis. It was a bold plan that sparked a great deal of conversation throughout the event.So you can imagine I was disheartened when reading Ev Williams’…
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One of the lessons 2016 has taught us is that there's a difference between "unpredictable" and "unexpected." That's as true in digital media and ad tech as it is anywhere else. Retracing steps, you can look back and make sense of how we got here. It's just been a slightly…
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It may sound like a joke, but Index Exchange has been coordinating trips to Toronto for numerous major publishers and DSPs to meet their squad of 200 engineers. Many a wiseacre would comment they’d rather avoid engineers entirely than travel long distances to meet them, but Index Index Exchange President…
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Possibly the biggest reason header bidding is such a game-changer is because it gives demand sources insight into more—if not all—of a publisher’s inventory. This enables buyers to better evaluate inventory and bid more acutely in real-time buying environments. (If you feel a need to revisit the horrors of the…
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My company, Gladly, has a unique perspective on the ad industry as both an ad network helping publishers monetize their audience, and as a publisher of our own small/medium website, Tab for a Cause, that sees roughly 40 million monthly banner ad impressions. In our experience, small publishers in particular…
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