AppNexus Launches PreBid For Video Advertising

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AppNexus announced the launch of video header bidding capabilities in prebid.js, the free and open source solution used by hundreds of publishers.

The offering, called PreBid Video, enables video publishers to realize the best market price for their video inventory, and improves user experience by decreasing latency. AppNexus now provides the industry’s only open prebid solutions for display, mobile, and video formats.

“Developing PreBid Video was a natural next step in our mission to create a better video internet,” said Eric Hoffert, SVP Video Technology, AppNexus. “PreBid has become the new monetization standard for display advertising, helping publishers realize the best market price for their inventory in a fair and transparent auction and avoiding the ‘Google AdX tax.’ While PreBid Video gives video publishers the same monetization benefits as header bidding for display, it is also designed to mitigate latency, which has been a key area of focus for AppNexus’ video technology initiative. Everyone wins—publishers, advertisers, and consumers—when the industry transitions away from closed algorithms and black box methodologies to header bidding’s open auction approach.”

Unlike other video header bidding solutions in the market, PreBid Video is open source and designed to support multiple video players, multiple video ad servers, and multiple demand sources. The technology is specifically designed to fight latency by running transparent auctions asynchronously on page load so that video demand can be ready by the time a user clicks “play” in the video player.

“We are thrilled with the test results of PreBid Video from AppNexus,” said Jayson Dubin, CEO, PlayWire. “We’ve been able to generate video revenue at CPMs ranging from $15 to $30 and our average PreBid Video CPM is 100% percent higher than the average price on the open video exchange. In addition, two of the largest advertisers in the U.S. bought our video inventory via AppNexus. Based on these tremendous results, we’ve integrated AppNexus PreBid Video directly into our platform so that hundreds of video publishers can make use of it.”

“The video header bidding market is still nascent relative to display,” continued Hoffert. “But increasing video advertising budgets combined with header bidding’s proven ability to bring improved transparency, revenue, and user experience indicates the adoption of PreBid Video is poised to be a key next step for video publishers. In a supply constrained marketplace, this approach opens up major new inventory opportunities for video buyers.”

AppNexus’ video header bidding technology is now available in beta on GitHub, including prebid.js source code, documentation on how to integrate with Google DoubleClick For Publishers’ video ad server, and code samples for a number of popular video players and solutions including video.js, JW Player, Brightcove, Kaltura, and Ooyala. The solution supports instream video for pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll ad units. PreBid Video is currently integrated with the AppNexus Video SSP, which consists of demand from hundreds of global video buyers and bidders, with adaptors planned for additional demand partners.

A creative audit process with the AppNexus Video SSP ensures that ad managers running secondary auctions are excluded in order to further reduce latency. As PreBid Video is built directly into prebid.js, the beta version is available to the more than 1,500 active community members, 200 publishers, and 10,000 websites that are utilizing the open source project.

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