ROXOT THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

Many still believe that header bidding increases pricing for publishers' inventory. This should be one of the major reasons publishers enjoy a 20-30% revenue increase from implementing header bidding.

In this piece for ExchangeWire, Alex Kharitoshin, marketing and product director, Roxot, explains that, in spite of this growth being set to continue, there is a misconception around the impact that header bidding is having on inventory competition.

The more developed the market is, the fewer growth opportunities there are. As major markets are maturing, publishers will continue to struggle to increase their advertising revenues.

Publishers are excited at having AI comb through their vast supplies of data to optimize inventory pricing in real time on programmatic markets. But hold on, says Roxot Marketing Director Alex Kharitoshin—this practice can have some serious drawbacks.

While publishers waste their resources on collecting data from different data sources, manually formatting and merging excel files, and using a dev tools console for real-time analytics, data-driven decisions are just a dream.

While header bidding can increase publisher CPMs and revenue, the growing complexity of the implementations makes it harder to differentiate vendor partners.

Through header bidding, publishers aren't just seeing more revenue from their demand partners–they're also seeing seeing huge amounts of data. The problem is, that data isn't always clearly understandable, and isn't always easy to take action on it.

Currently, publishers are discussing emerging server-to-server header bidding solutions and latency issues but ignoring the biggest problems with website revenue: Why are publishers still relying on second-price auctions to sell online advertising?