Weekly Roundup: Funding Choices Update, Facebook’s App Bidder, and more!

Google’s Funding Choices will not restrict the vendors to 12.

Last Thursday, AdExchanger reported that Google will completely cut off the 12 vendor partners limit on its consent management platform ‘Funding Choices’. Now, a publisher has no limit on the number of partners.

“The change being made now is in line with our priority of this being a flexible framework for publishers”

– Vegard Johnsen, Google product manager for GDPR and sustainable advertising.

ICYDK: ‘Funding Choices’ is the free CMP tool developed by Google to help publishers deal with the consent management. But, it wasn’t made available to all as expected and is still in beta phase.

So, why the backpedal?

Starting from publishers to consortiums to adtech vendors (obviously), everyone criticized Google for the impractical vendor limit and undermining the Open Internet. So, Google reverses the policy and chops off the limit permanently.

Time Inc. has 158 homepage partner tags

– Ghostery

How does the cmp look like?

Funding Choices will have more granular options so that the users can go through the partnered adtech vendors. But one thing remains the same – the Yes or No button. In short, it looks similar to other IAB licensed CMPs in the market.

And, there’s a new update

Google is planning to connect its Google Contributor to the Funding Choices. So, if a user says no, instead of serving non-personalized ads, a publisher can ask for a contribution (paywall).

Facebook launches in-app Header Bidding

Last week, Facebook announced its support for In-app Header Bidding in a blog post. This means Facebook Audience Network (FAN) can now serve ads to app publishers who run in-house monetization technology.

In addition, the company is reportedly partnering with Fyber, MAX, and Twitter’s MoPub, so that it could also serve ads to app publishers who utilize the above said ad networks for monetization.

Of course, Facebook tested the App bidder with app publishers around the world, prior to the release.

Beta Results?

“We have been testing Facebook’s app bidding solution since last year and feel optimistic about the changes this will bring to the industry. We believe this is the right technology to create an open and transparent marketplace and are excited to see others moving in this direction.”

– Jarkko Rajamäki, Vice President, Advertising, Rovio Entertainment.

App publishers (such as Rovio, Talefun and GameInsight) who’ve tested the app bidder from Facebook, experienced a 20% lift in their revenues.

Any future plans?

The social network said it plans to partner with any app publishers or programmatic partners who follow the Facebook’s Code of Conduct.

Personally, we’re expecting to see a huge following for the FAN. Why?

FAN has been known as the valuable demand partner for its CPM and bidding frequency on the mobile web. Most likely, the trend will follow on the in-app environment too.

Ads.txt for Mobile Apps

IAB Tech Lab announced the support of Ads.txt for mobile apps to address the ad fraud issues haunting the in-app environment.

“Given the dominance of mobile in general and apps more specifically, it is critical that we bring ad fraud solutions to the mobile app landscape”

– Dennis Buchheim, Senior VP, and General Manager, IAB Tech Lab

Ads.txt is a simple method used by publishers and distributors to publicly declare the authorized sellers and resellers of their inventories. Since its marketplace release in June 2017, over 2 million publishers have adopted the method to combat ad fraudsters.

Now, it’s time to do the same for the in-app environment. Noticeably, the released ads.txt guidance will help,

• the sell-side to use OpenRTB bid requests to find app identifiers,
• the app developers to host ads.txt files using web domains,
• the buyers to find the ads.txt files.

Here’s the official release document for your reference. As you can see, IAB Tech Lab proposed three solutions with the specifics and the guidance will be open for receiving feedbacks until next month.

Demand Path Optimization?

We are familiar with the supply path optimization (SPO) and know the long-term advantages of it.

Here’s a quick refresher: Supply Path Optimization is a technique used by DSPs to cut off the inefficient supplies (SSPs) from the chain, with the help of algorithms. It weeds out the bad actors and fraudsters in the ecosystem. 

But, there’s a chance for us to meet demand path optimization. Why?

Advertisers have started to decrease the number of platforms they use to buy inventories programmatically. eMarketer reported that the buyers dropped the DSPs by 40% in the last 2 years.

Pathmatic, an adtech firm studied the top 100 advertisers on its platform and found that the buyers on average use four DSPs to buy at least 1% of the programmatic inventories per month, at present. It is 40 percent less when compared to seven DSPs buyers used two years ago.

Where are we heading?

Likely, a DPO. As advertisers start to analyze and experiment with different DSPs and combination of DSPs, they’ll find the unsuitable ones quite easily. Obviously, the next step is a layoff.

On the other hand, SSPs are also working to get the right demand partners to ensure better user experience and higher CPMs.

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