Regardless of the fact that 2020 had some unprecedented developments, AdPushup landed firmly on its feet and seems to be moving on an upward trajectory still. 2021 started off great for AdPushup, as we made it to Lumascape. And now, we are officially a member of the Prebid community.
Prebid is an open-source platform that began its journey with the launch of Prebid.js in 2015. The header bidding wrapper, which is also the most popular wrapper among publishers now, aimed to make the implementation of header bidding easier for publishers.
In light of this event, we thought that it would be a good idea to touch upon technical aspects of Prebid and see where AdPushup is headed in the future. So, we consulted Ankit Oberoi, Co-founder and CEO of AdPushup, and Akshay Varma, Director of Product Management at AdPushup. Ankit shared his thoughts about the current and future position of AdPushup and Akshay shared some great insights about Prebid’s capabilities from a product perspective.
Today, Prebid.org has expanded to become a global community comprising various publishers, advertisers, technology partners and members, and a product suite that offers solutions for mobile apps, websites, and server-side.
AdPushup has recently become a member of the Prebid community. What does this mean for AdPushup?
At AdPushup, our header bidding suite has always been built on top of Prebid, and over the years we have built numerous features and solutions on the same, such as realtime reporting and improved auction logic, etc., which have significantly helped publishers.
Ankit Oberoi
Now being an official part of Prebid, we aim to participate in the community more actively and contribute to the open-source project by releasing some of our features to the publisher community at large.
What role is Prebid playing in furthering the advancement of the header bidding technique and how significant is that role?
Prebid, an open source tech backed by leading SSPs, has gotten both sellers and buyers on board, thereby solving the chicken and egg problem. Moreover, given that Prebid has a host of open source contributors, there is a core motivation to advance the state of technology in the industry.
Akshay Verma
A lot of technical advancements take place in silos (much like AdPushup’s 3rd gen wrapper), however Prebid brings mass access to such technical developments, albeit at a slower pace.
Prebid has rolled out some truly wonderful stuff – support for video and native ads, Prebid Server for server-to-server bidding, timely updates for compliances such as TCF and CCPA, identity solutions, analytics integrations – all geared towards increasing header bidding yields and enhancing the efficiency of auctions.
Also Read: How to Find the Right Header Bidding Partner
We know Prebid is a preferred wrapper in the ecosystem. How lucrative do you think is it for publishers given it requires technical expertise to build and use?
For publishers who have their hearts set on writing their own wrappers – it’s extremely lucrative. Prebid has already done most of the heavy lifting in terms of the ad rendering pipeline. It is highly scalable since the burden of adding and maintaining bidder specific code is now taken up by the SSPs (enough motivation to do so given Prebid’s massive adoption; the cost of maintenance is much lower given the large developer base of Prebid).
– Akshay Verma
Any security concerns or major bugs are taken care of on priority (open source benefit). A large part of the cost of maintaining the wrapper is passed on to the open source community maintaining the project. Publishers are also provided with community support, which is certainly beneficial for them.
Additionally, vertical integrations required for integrating newer formats etc. are already wired in. New R&D gets outsourced – a multitude of ID solutions would want to integrate with Prebid – you just have to worry about adding a few lines of code and not integrating the entire solution.
This being said, even if Prebid takes care of a lot of updates, you’ll still have a large maintenance overhead- ad tech changes at the speed of thought. The wrapper in itself has massive room for optimizations. In case you’re conscious about your Lighthouse score or wish to optimize the yield, making these changes in-house will take thousands of engineering man hours.
Staying abreast with the latest changes and making the required updates to make the setup work with the optimal parameters is hyper challenging. Certain integrations that seem straightforward actually end up taking months. Due to the fragmented nature of the tech/ecosystem, engineering skills and talent is not directly transferable.
For publishers wishing to focus on their core publishing business and/or seeking optimizations/control, that’ll take supreme know-how from an in-house team, which is not lucrative at all.
Given that third-party cookies will soon be out of the market, what options do publishers who rely heavily on Prebid for client-side HB have? Please share thoughts on SharedID.
Multiple identity solutions are going to be available in some time which will be able to take care of cookie-based as well as cookie-less inventory, including AdPushup’s own solution. At this point the industry is seeing massive movement on this front, as Chrome will stop allowing third-party cookies in just a short amount of time now. Even TTD, one of the largest DSPs, has rolled out a second version of UnifiedID. One of the largest projects, Digitrust went kaput. Every single player in the industry- Pubmatic, Magnite, Liveramp, Criteo, is focusing on launching some solution to deal with the demise of cookies.
It is important to point out that one solution may/will not work for all publishers. They will have to experiment and see what works for them according to their audience and other factors, there’s no right answer here.
SharedID is principally very similar to the other ID solutions out there, except for the fact that it’s more democratized by many orders of magnitude. Democratization has it’s advantages- easier adoption, transparency, and faster development- all key pillars for building a solid ID solution. Moreover, SharedID gives publishers the room to use the unique identifier for their own first party solution as well, which is an added advantage.Akshay Verma
Given the massive user base of Prebid and the simple implementation, SharedID should scale well. Once it scales well, SSPs and DSPs will be incentivized to start using it. Every single player across the value chain wants some ID solution to make sure that the demise of cookies does not affect their business.
What’s next for AdPushup?
We have an action packed 2021 planned ahead with a lot of new features which we are going to continue building over our heading bidding and reporting stack. Our header bidding hyper optimizer is already showing great results and we will continue to add more rules and actions on the existing solution. The major aim for the remaining year is to increase yield with better page performance and engagement.
Ankit Oberoi
In Closing
The sunsetting of cookies is probably one of the major issues that is faced by the ad tech industry at the moment, and the fact that Prebid has managed to stay on top of this situation alone says a lot. The Prebid community seems to be prepared to deal with problematic scenarios, which is definitely expected considering its position in the ad tech industry.
AdPushup is also aiming to rise to the occasion by providing publishers with technology that makes programmatic advertising an easy feat. Now that the company has become a member of the Prebid community, it will be able to help out a larger number of publishers through its solutions.
If you have any questions regarding Prebid or AdPushup’s solutions, you can reach out to us at blog@adpushup.com.
Shubham is a digital marketer with rich experience working in the advertisement technology industry. He has vast experience in the programmatic industry, driving business strategy and scaling functions including but not limited to growth and marketing, Operations, process optimization, and Sales.
