Ad tech is an awfully cyclical industry. Ghosts of the past come back to haunt us all the time, whether they be ad fraud or brand safety. A Daily Beast story detailing how apps leveraging the Facebook Audience Network found themselves knee-deep in complaints about offensive ads thanks to an e-commerce…
Read More
DSPs Hidden Fees Dragged Into the Light AdExchanger published a lengthy explanation of the infamous hidden fees DSPs sometimes charge. It's common knowledge in the industry that DSPs are often inclined to take a cut off of the transactions they enable, and then add extra fees on top of that.…
Read More
Ads.txt landed in the digital media world circled by a lot more confusion than you'd expect from a text file. Although the goals of rendering domain spoofing worthless and cutting down on arbitrage were quite noble, the approach was almost too simple for an industry that revels in complexity. Fortunately, the folks at…
Read More
Last week a lot of my industry connections passed around the Buzzfeed story, “Attack of the Zombie Websites,” about a programmatic, bot-driven web of lies that may have shorted advertisers tens of millions of dollars. Although it was meticulously reported, I had a hard time reading the full article not…
Read More
Last week marked my return to the non-Brexiting part of Europe in several years to attend DMEXCO. My assumption is that most operations people really don’t know a lot about DMEXCO other than Germany is a funny place to go to something that sounds like it belongs in Latin America.…
Read More
With all the hubbub about first-price auctions taking over the real-time bidding ecosystem, I don’t think there’s been enough talk about why the second-price auction is currently the standard bearer. That’s why I was exhilarated when Univision’s Eyal Ebel brought the point up at our recent Meetup on the current…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More