


“We see ourselves as an extended tool to better manage DFP installation,” Higgins said. The healthy ecosystem comes from multiple header bidding partners, and the transparency comes from adding in the SmartWrapper solution. “We like a healthy ecosystem, and transparency to understand for what’s going on.” “We have not had great success relying on one partner for everything,” said Topix’s Rubenstein. But it will be a neutral third-party technology that doesn’t favor one demand source.ĭespite many ad tech companies’ claims to work better when they get everything, the reality is that more competition generally gets better results for publishers. The platform helps publishers with partner integration, management and optimization. SmartWrapper is one piece of a larger publisher tech platform Technorati is building, which will be dubbed Contango. An API to allow publishers to pull analytics into their own custom reporting interfaces will be ready next week. Going forward, SmartWrapper will have more “smart optimization” capabilities and analytics that enable publishers to manage partners and improve yield. “We’ve cut down on load time for the partners.” “If we know that 95% of the bids are in by one second, there’s no need to wait another second,” Rubenstein said. SmartWrapper can also help publishers like Topix understand how long to wait for bids to come in. Or they can tell partners how much to raise CPMs to increase their win rate. Publishers can limit partners that only bid during the first few page views of a user session on subsequent views so as not to wait on bid responses. SmartWrapper identifies how often partners bid and how often they win, helping publishers decide which partners are worth the latency they create, or if they should be removed or given a strict response time, Higgins said. Partners pick and choose what information to share, and the ad server only states who won and at what price, Rubenstein said. Under most configurations, it’s difficult for publishers to see how often a header partner is bidding and winning. SmartWrapper clarified what was going on, he said. Though the partners added more competition, resulting in a “nice lift,” Topix needed a solution to understand the yield of each partner and make sure no one slowed down the site, said company COO Steve Rubenstein. It added its first header bidding partner two years ago, and now works with several. Topix, a local news site and forum with 13 million monthly uniques, according to comScore, has been testing SmartWrapper for the past few months. Higgins describes SmartWrapper’s container as “glue” that helps publishers add partners without causing an earlier partner’s tag to break, better manages timeout issues and provides insight into performance. The SmartWrapper technology runs one tag in the header of a publisher’s page that contains all of the other header bidding partners’ tags, simplifying setup and unifying reporting, management and optimization. But adding multiple partners takes valuable developer time and requires vigilant oversight to monitor issues like page latency. Header bidding adds competition by taking bids before the ad server call, used by partners such as A9, Sonobi and PubMatic. “Publishers that we’ve talked to have one to two and another four to five that have been knocking down their doors, but can’t integrate because of costs to implement, latency and data leakage concerns,” Higgins said. Technorati runs a network business serving mid-tail to long-tail publishers and bloggers, but will focus on selling this product to comScore 200 publishers dealing with the pain points of adopting header bidding technology. “We see this continuing down the path of moving away from the network model and into SaaS,” Technorati CEO Shani Higgins said. With the product release, Technorati enters a different market. Technorati on Monday released SmartWrapper, a SaaS-based product that helps publishers run multiple header bidding partners by bringing all demand partners into one place.įor publishers juggling multiple partners, SmartWrapper helps manage implementation page latency and gives publishers more unified analytics.
