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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We’ve written a bit in 2016 about visual monetization, and how much the marketplace has matured through smarter technology and growing interest and attention from publishers. There are factors we can discern anecdotally, or by looking at the broader digital market and extrapolating. But it’s more valuable to have fresh…
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You can dance around it, you can equivocate, you can point out there are other factors involved. But when you break it down, you have to concede: Running multiple header bidding partners tends to increase page latency. This is a significant concern for publishers, who find themselves in a position…
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Header tags and bidding have worked wonders for publisher revenue when it comes to display, so no surprise that pubs were eager to put the so-called “hack” to work on the video side. But news flash: video is a whole different world from display. While header integrations would be incredibly…
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Value obviously can move the needle in any marketplace, but what really makes waves is the perception of value. That's been happening in header bidding. More and more companies have been trying to get into the header, offering their own integrations and their own idividual "twist" that would set them…
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Header integrations have made publishers think anew about what role the traditional ad server will have, going forward--if there’ll even be a role for it to play at all. Whatever happens, it seems the dynamic of the ad marketplace is pushing for a substantial change. (Gavin Dunaway published an article…
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“Is header bidding a hack?” This question invariably gets asked in every panel or interview revolving around header bidding. “Hack” is a term dripping with bile and contempt – it symbolizes a ragged workaround versus some mythical notion of organic development. But such development rarely occurs in the digital advertising…
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