Nonetheless, SSPs regularly duplicate bid requests, said Will Doherty, vp of inventory development at demand-side platform The Trade Desk, which has issued several policies over the past five years to try to thwart the practice.
“It’s not something where it ebbs and flows. …. There’s a pretty steady [flow] of it,” Doherty said. “We’re definitely seeing improvement that’s largely the result of us being extraordinarily proactive. It’s certainly far from solved.”
Disrupting programmatic economics
Publishers with larger audiences can send more bid requests and get more bids because their larger audiences make them more valuable. Bid duplication tricks demand-side platforms (DSPs) into thinking that a publisher has more inventory than it really does, Doherty said.
Bids are relatively rare compared to bid requests because there is far more supply than demand, he added.
“These bids are precious and scarce—it’s like fracking,” Doherty said. “[SSPs] inundate the ground with requests and hope to shake loose enough bids to go their way.”
A potential impact of bid duplication is driving up the cost per thousand clicks (CPMs) over time, said Shiv Gupta, founder of ad-tech education firm U of Digital. More bids will eventually generate more demand over time, which will lead to higher prices.
“It will cost [buyers] more money for the same amount of performance, which is a raw deal,” he said.
Of course, flooding the market with supply could depress prices, so the exact impact on CPMs is not certain, other sources said. The bigger issue is that advertisers lose transparency into what they’re buying, said Doherty.
“It can distort all kinds of targeting and metrics because it can make it harder to really understand where audiences are,” Doherty said. “It really makes it harder to assign value in real-time.”
Greener supply chains
Theoretically, publishers should benefit from more demand. But for publishers trying to work with the buy-side to create shorter, more efficient and environmentally friendly supply paths, and hopefully garner higher revenues as a result of selling themselves in a more premium fashion, SSP bid duplication feels counterproductive.
“The whole green sustainability [initiative] is not talking about wanton bid duplication,” said Justin Wohl, chief revenue officer at Salon, TVTropes and Snopes. “It’s taken direct aim at publishers” with inefficient supply chains.
“We can’t control if [SSPs] are gaming and duplicating” a clean supply path a publisher has created, Wohl added.