Header Bidding as Smart Service for Selling Ads in the Digital Era

Abstract

Header bidding refers to an innovative, smart service for online advertising. It facilitates concurrent, automatic real-time bidding for ad spaces on online publishers' websites and thereby supports online publishers' in their efforts to tackle Google's dominance in the online advertising market. Interdisciplinary service science research on the opportunities and challenges of smart header bidding services is still scarce. To this end, we analyze a comprehensive dataset, covering header bidding solutions and connected supply-side platforms, for the top 20 German website publishers. We carve out requirements for establishing header bidding as a successful smart service in the digital arena and offer some guidance on how to design and take advantage of header bidding services for monetizing publishers' online content. We further suggest that publishers must monitor rising header bidding substitutes, such as Google's exchange bidding, to secure sustainable value creation from header bidding as technology-based service transformation in the digital world.

The role of perceived usefulness and annoyance on programmatic advertising: the moderating effect of Internet user privacy and cookies

“…Programmatic advertising is therefore born from the use of technology in the buying and selling of digital advertising, but it is necessary to differentiate it from real time bidding (RTB), which was born as a response to the large amount of supply of spaces on the Internet and demand from advertisers to place their ads in these, resulting in a real-time auction system (Aslam and Karjaluoto, 2017). So, RTB is a model for computational advertising that uses technologies such as big data (Loebbecke et al. , 2020).…”

“…Programmatic advertising is therefore born from the use of technology in the buying and selling of digital advertising, but it is necessary to differentiate it from real time bidding (RTB), which was born as a response to the large amount of supply of spaces on the Internet and demand from advertisers to place their ads in these, resulting in a real-time auction system (Aslam and Karjaluoto, 2017). So, RTB is a model for computational advertising that uses technologies such as big data (Loebbecke et al, 2020). It is based on the analysis of a massive amount of data generated by cookies from Internet users and it has the ability to identify the characteristics and interests in real time of the target audience viewing each ad impression, thus offering ads that best match the user's interests and optimising their prices through a programmatic auction method (Miralles-Pechu an et al, 2021).…”

Dynamic Ad Network Ordering Method Using Reinforcement Learning

“…Although Header Bidding has become popular in the last few years, Waterfall Strategy is still used as an advertising approach for many websites because its latency can be significantly lower than HB [24]. According to [21], around 25% of websites in the US still use Waterfall Strategy as a standard advertising approach. Besides, in some recent RTB systems, HB is combined with Waterfall Strategy, and it is not completely replaced by HB [3].…”