Malware is a blanket term that applies to any software planted on the user’s device with malicious intent. It’s come a long way from that old bogeyman of the rogue hacker launching “gotcha!” viruses, which captured the public imagination in the ‘90s. Now it’s a very different bogeyman, and malware…
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Single-request architecture is a setup where, in a header bidding framework, the bidder sends one call to the ad server for multiple ad slots, and the server returns bids for all of those ad slots at the same time. To explain why single-request might be advantageous to the publisher, and…
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With Oracle’s recent purchase of Moat, one of the more widely-integrated third-party measurement companies out there, the term "Intersection Observer" has been thrown around a lot lately. To some, the Intersection Observer has been put forward as the possible driver of the next generation of viewability measurement, and as the…
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A private marketplace is an invite-only programmatic auction. A publisher sets aside certain inventory, or a group of publishers pool inventory they’ve set aside, and grants approval to certain buyers who can bid on it. In theory, PMPs were created to combine the most appealing elements of direct sales and…
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Before we talk about server-to-server (or S2S, or server-side bidding, or whatever you want to call it), we have to talk about header bidding. Header bidding allows publishers to solicit bids on all their inventory from a select group of demand partners in a unified auction, just by putting the…
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Blockchain is commonly referred to as a ledger—a shared, decentralized database, made up of so-called “blocks,” which are just hashed records of transactions. In each block, which is permanent and can’t be altered after it’s logged, you have a timestamp and a link to an earlier block. That gives participants…
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Call it a browser cookie, a web cookie, an HTTP cookie—it’s all the same thing, just a small text file, not even executable code. A cookie takes the form of a name-value pair (e.g. name=value). Originally designed to recall information like logins, form data and shopping cart contents, they’ve been…
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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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Yield management is a slippery topic to explain, and even more complicated in practice. Rather than explain how it works, it’s probably more helpful to explain what it does. Well… what it’s supposed to do, in theory. First, the problem that yield management aims to solve for publishers: The total…
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