The technology which allows publishers to entertain ad bids from multiple demand sources simultaneously has made in-roads to facilitating a healthy chunk of display ad sales in the last couple of years.
So what is next on the radar for header bidding?
The tech begun by deploying on the client side and for display ads specifically. The next challenge is whether the method can also scale to other formats and channels.
There are technical hurdles in place – but the short history of header bidding is actually a history of overcoming technical hurdles time after time. It looks like header bidding is set for further iteration in 2018, says PubMatic product management senior director Nishant Khatri in this video interview with Beet.TV
“I think there are a lot of opportunities to help header bidding grow in video, in-app, native, these up-and-coming channels,” he says.
“In the in-app world, publishers have to go through, a very archaic monetization process. They have to install multiple monetization SDKs, which are mediating between each other, so there’s a waterfall, passing impressions back from one to the other. I believe in 2018, with header bidding around, a publisher shouldn’t have to go through that process. So I think in-app header bidding will grow in 2018.
“The second thing I’m excited about is hybrid wrappers. You’ll see wrappers which are able to perform on the client side as well as server side. So, publishers will now have more choices where they’re able to run a header tag from their, again, desired exchanges, either on the client side or the server side, depending on what kind of a monetization and latency profile they want for their websites.”
One thing is for sure, Khatri says – when it comes to making the technology available, open-source is the way to go.
This September, Rubicon Project, PubMatic and AppNexus launched Prebid.org, an open-source version of the client-side Javascript “wrappers” on which header bidding depends.
Wrappers themselves were an iterative solution to technical challenges faced by early header bidding deployments. But Khatri says proprietary wrappers came with insufficient transparency. That’s why PubMatic and others teamed to make a sub-standard that anyone could see and download from GitHub – one that has fast become amongst the most popular of header wrappers.
