2019/07/24 by Michalis Pachilakis, Panagiotis Papadopoulos, Pachilakis, Michalis +5
Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #Consumer Market Behavior and Pricing #Digital Marketing and Social Media #Digital Platforms and Economics #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Privacy, Security, and Data Protection
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1907.12649
openalex publication_date 2019/07/24 · openalex created_date 2022/07/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In recent years, Header Bidding (HB) has gained popularity among web\npublishers, challenging the status quo in the ad ecosystem. Contrary to the\ntraditional waterfall standard, HB aims to give back to publishers control of\ntheir ad inventory, increase transparency, fairness and competition among\nadvertisers, resulting in higher ad-slot prices. Although promising, little is\nknown about how this ad protocol works: What are HB's possible implementations,\nwho are the major players, and what is its network and UX overhead? To address\nthese questions, we design and implement HBDetector: a novel methodology to\ndetect HB auctions on a website at real time. By crawling 35,000 top Alexa\nwebsites, we collect and analyze a dataset of 800k auctions. We find that: (i)\n14.28% of top websites utilize HB. (ii) Publishers prefer to collaborate with a\nfew Demand Partners who also dominate the waterfall market. (iii) HB latency\ncan be significantly higher (up to 3x in median case) than waterfall.\n