The practice of header bidding has been around for a few years, but only in the last year and change has it become standard practice for publishers. Thanks to a variety of header-related products and services offered by a number of tech vendors, it’s become much easier for header implementations to spread beyond just the publishers that have the know-how and in-house resources to handle them.
The flip side is, because of publishers’ appetite for header solutions, more and more vendors are rushing into the header space with their own offerings. For a lot of pubs doing header, keeping the incoming demand fresh and clean will start to feel more like keeping debris out of the programmatic waterfall.
In this installment of the series of header-related video interviews AdMonsters developed in conjunction with Index Exchange, FullStory Product Marketer Jordan Woods lays out a vision for the future of the header space. He sees it getting crowded, more challenging for pubs to manage: The leading header partners to date have mostly been well-known players, but as the technical barrier to entry begins to drop a bit, there’s room for more questionable companies to sneak in.
By Jordan’s assessment, you’re going to want to make sure your header partners bring quality creative and new and unique demand. This might call for a shift in thinking for demand-hungry pubs: The question of how many header partners is too many might not be a rhetorical one after all. Header partner evaluation might become more intensive for pubs, to figure out how new partners might work strategically with existing partners’ demand, and which potential partners you shouldn’t bother letting into your header at all. Check out that interview below, and the rest of the interviews in the series’ YouTube channel.