Tim Peterson says, “Long story short: Facebook’s ad network is challenging ad networks run by Google and others to see who can get publishers the best deals for their inventory by adopting a process called header bidding that levels the playing field for publisher’s programmatic ad sales.

Long story long: There are a lot of parallels between programmatic advertising and online travel booking. For an advertiser or traveler, instead of checking prices with individual publishers or airlines one by one, you can check ad networks or travel search sites that aggregate ad slots or plane seats from a bunch of publishers or airlines. And for a publisher or airline, instead of selling ads or tickets one by one, you can sell them through a bunch of different places simultaneously in hopes of selling more of them sooner.

But it’s not exactly that simple, at least not for publishers. Specifically, it’s not exactly simultaneous.

When an ad slot goes up for sale — which happens for each ad slot each time someone loads a page of the publisher’s site — it doesn’t go up for sale everywhere at once. Instead the publisher checks different ad networks to see what price it can get for a given slot; this is called the “waterfall.” If the first ad network matches the publisher’s desired price, the deal is done without any other ad”.

Facebook adopts header bidding to make its ad network more competitive with Google’s

Marketing Land

Sharing is caring