Ad tech can no longer handle all the ads available for sale

pulse

July 17, 2017 6:56 PM

The volume of digital ads available via programmatic technology has exploded. Thus, the ad tech company Rubicon has acquired the startup nToggle to help.

There are so many ads for sale on the web that ad tech firms can barely even handle it.

Many ad tech companies promise software designed to process thousands of ad transactions in real time. But thanks to header bidding – a tech hack that has leveled the playing field in programmatic ad space over the past several years – ad tech can't process all the ads that are out there.

That's according to Tom Kershaw, chief technology officer at the embattled ad tech firm Rubicon Project. The surge in popularity in header bidding, which allows web publishers to open up their ad space to multiple potential buyers simultaneously, has led to such an explosion in inventory that it is straining the current infrastructure, he contends.

That's why Rubicon just spent

d buying software companies like DataXu and The Trade Desk, known as demand side platforms, or DSPs, are supposed to be good at doing solving for the challenge Rubicon is describing. But ever since header bidding took off, these companies are dealing with five times the number of ads, said Kershaw.

Previously, when an ad on a publisher's site went up for sale via various programmatic channels, potential buyers took turns. Google's ad exchange might get the first chance to bid on that ad, and if that exchange passed, another buyer, like AppNexus might get a shot.

But with header bidding, publishers can let multiple ad buyers all get a chance at their ad inventory all at once. Which means that DSPs are seeing potentially all the same ads on all the same publishers again and again.

That's where

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