Digiday Research: Publishers lag in understanding header bidding

Only 22 percent of publishing executives in Digiday’s survey claimed to have a perfect understanding of how first- and second-price auctions work. Ninety-four percent said they had at least some understanding, while only 6 percent said they had no understanding. Publisher executives thought less highly of their industry as a whole. While 51 percent thought their personal knowledge was either solid or perfect, only 6 percent thought their industry had solid knowledge. No one thought their industry had perfect knowledge.

Most publishers are understandably only focused on content rather than building internal ad tech. Freestar, an agency that helps publishers monetize their ad inventory, has over 30 people dedicated to that task, whereas most publishers have only a small team of a few people, if not just one person, focused on monetizing ad inventory. These companies lack the resources and time to commit to understanding header bidding.

“At the end of the day, publishers aren’t ad tech companies,” said Christopher Stark, co-founder of Freestar. “Most of [the executives] are more worried about strategy around content than auction economics. [Header bidding] is deep, nerdy shit that executives don’t want to know and take the time to understand.”

Even if executives wanted to learn or people in the weeds actually responsible for figuring heading bidding out, there’s a serious lack of informational resources. “I don’t think there’s really anything out there and that’s part of the problem. Nothing out there gets someone anywhere close enough to be current,” said Stark. For those curious he offers a 2400 member Slack channel born out of a Reddit group focused on solving questions around ad operations as one of the best places a person can go.”