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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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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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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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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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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Match every impression with the channel likely to garner the most revenue – seems like the stuff of operational daydreams, but I’m not going to tell you to snap out of it. Such dynamic inventory allocation is real, oh-so-real, and it’s referred to as holistic yield management. I know that…
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