Roxot Report Names AppNexus, Rubicon, and Index Exchange As Top Header Bidding Partners

In collaboration with publishers using Prebid Analytics, Roxot conducted a header bidding partners research based on the real publishers’ client-side data. With the rapid development of header bidding, publishers are often overwhelmed with a variety of header bidding wrappers, demand partners, and ways to implement the tech on their sites – there are more than 60 bidder adapters available only for prebid.js.

Almost 4 billion ad requests and 1.3 billion impressions generated by US users on 179 websites from July 15 to Sept. 30, 2017 were analyzed to provide publishers with the insights into the performance of the most popular header bidding demand partners. Despite the fact that the data doesn’t represent the whole market, the report gives the clear understanding of the top bidders performance and implementation trends that may be used to adjust publisher’s monetization strategy.

In the pursuit of maximized revenue, online media companies try to increase the fill of their inventory by often blindly adding new partners. The report shows that, indeed, the site fill rate (how often there is at least one bid for an ad request) correlates with the number of demand partners on the site. However, the success of publisher’s monetization strategy depends more on the right combination of demand partners in the header rather than their quantity.

“No doubts header bidding boosts publisher’s website revenue. But let’s face it – header bidding doesn’t work on its own. The research is intended to be the reference for publishers so they can adjust their business strategy based on the real industry data, trends, and adoption patterns”  said Radmir Nasyrov, CEO, Roxot.

According to the Roxot’s research, Sovrn, AOL, and Index Exchange are the most popular prebid.js bidders among Prebid Analytics users as they received the most ad requests. However, AOL and Sovrn have low efficiency and can’t fill more than a half of requests. In turn, Rubicon Project and AppNexus reply with a bid to 74 percent and 70 percent ad requests respectively, which makes them the top demand partners by Bid Rate.

As a result of the wide adoption, frequent bidding, and competitive clearing prices, Index Exchange and AppNexus are the demand partners with the biggest shares of total desktop impressions (16.3 percent and 11.7 percent respectively). Rubicon Project is the leader in the number of Mobile Impressions with the 25 percent share of all mobile Impressions.

AppNexus, Rubicon Project, and Index Exchange are the top revenue-generating bidders with 18.2 percent, 13.9 percent, and 13.9 percent share of total Desktop Revenue respectively. Facebook Audience Network and Rubicon Project are the leaders in Mobile Revenue generated with an astonishing combined share of the Total Mobile Revenue exceeding 55 percent.