Dive Brief:
- Google has added dozens of tech partners and hundreds of publishers to the beta test of its exchange bidding dynamic allocation (EBDA) program, which serves as an alternative to header bidding, according to Ad Age.
- The move follows Facebook's announcement last week that it will now allow header bidding on the Facebook Audience Network for mobile publishers. EBDA, currently in closed beta, is expected to move to open beta in May.
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"Exchanges are building their businesses with improved inventory access, and new players are ramping up their buying or opening negotiations with us weekly," Jonathan Bellack, Google's director of product management, told Ad Age, adding that the EBDA has the potential to help "publishers improve their yields and exchanges to grow their businesses, without compromising user experience."
Dive Insight:
Header bidding is popular with publishers because it allows for simultaneous bids on the same ad inventory, potentially boosting the value of that inventory. However, to date, header bidding has had the fairly unglamorous reputation of serving as a workaround to Google's DoubleClick bid manager, which largely fulfills the same purpose as header bidding while delegating more control of the process to Google.
Facebook's move to make mobile header bidding a larger component of its Audience ad network was seen a major step in legitimizing the technology. Google's DoubleClick product has given the company a strong foothold in areas of digital advertising like programmatic — Ad Age notes it's essentially had a "monopoly" here for nearly 20 years — making Facebook's development a cause for concern for Google because it legitimizes header bidding, which is a workaround fo Doubleclick
In the past, research from AppNexus estimated about 70% of the comScore Top 200 publishers are using header bidding. However, more recent research from GetIntent found that only 12% of the top 1,000 websites tracked by Amazon's Alexa technology are using header bidding, though that number is set to grow now that both of the world's largest digital advertising platforms are putting a focus on it.