Dive Brief:
- Rubicon Project is beta testing header bidding for mobile apps with its FastLane product.
- In early test results with 20 publishers, FastLane is producing CPM increases of up to 300%, according to Rubicon.
- Mobile is newer, but it hasn't been able to resolve the same issue that has made header bidding popular on desktop ad buys – fragmented demand from multiple sources.
Dive Insight:
"On mobile, we have a much wider distribution of demand. There are expandable ads, rich media, interstitials, video, all running in a single ad slot. One buyer might be buying a standard banner ad at $1 CPM, when there’s also a $15 video campaign," Joe Prusz, head of mobile at Rubicon Project, told Ad Exchanger.
Currently, the main two mobile ad servers are MoPub and DoubleClick for Publishers. In choosing who will serve an ad, the two utilize price estimates of bids from RTB demand sources, rather than confirmed prices. The problem with this set up, as Ad Exchanger points out, is that going by estimates means publishers might lose out on revenue.
The benefit, then, of header bidding for mobile apps comes from mobile having a high level of price disparity, which according to Prusz means a bad waterfall setup costs publishers revenue. At the same time, updating a mobile ad stack isn’t easy and ultimately makes developers averse to frequent changes to that type of setup.
"Given how hard it is to implement SDKs, they stay in, even if they’re no longer performing. The value proposition for header bidding in mobile app is greater because it bypasses that Byzantine waterfall and the publisher doesn’t have to redo their waterfall in order to access more demand," Prusz said.
FastLane will be released more widely to publishers in Q1 of next year.
