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Comment by edmundsauto | Hacker News Reader

I would love to hear a complete response to the things you think are wrong in this article. The order/deal incorrectness is just semantics, and not all that useful.

I found the article's description of how header bidding operates useful. What's inaccurate about it? In particular, why does the header bidding library solicit bids from everyone except GAM, then ask GAM for final bid? Seems like contacting all of them would be the way to go -- or is GAM registering the ad impression for other networks as well? If so, that's really interesting! It means google has insight into the entire ad placement market, even when they don't have anything to do with the network.

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The publisher chooses the order in the waterfall for header bidding. Due to its nature Header Bidding is serial in the page and only a limited number of partners can bid on the page (4-5) and are called sequentially. Header bidding was created to increase competition for premium inventory beyond Google, so naturally Google ends up being used as remnant inventory in these cases because it’s always able to fill inventory, but not necessarily at the highest price and it’s thus placed last often but it really depends.

Also recently Google has shifted the auctions to unified pricing which means 1st price basically and a single floor for them to make their prices more competitive in header bidding, so this might have had effects on Google’s position in the waterfall as well given what the publisher want to accomplish.

Generally speaking the article is overall fine, there are some historical inaccuracies of sorts and innovations aren’t explained well, for example Google didn’t just start to track people because they figured, but because behavioral targeting retained customers of all sized as opposed to just the bigger ones that do brand awareness campaigns, and that was due to measurable superior performance.

> because behavioral targeting retained customers of all sized as opposed to just the bigger ones that do brand awareness campaigns, and that was due to measurable superior performance

Could you elaborate a bit more, particularly on the point about customer size? Are you referring to the fact that smaller companies couldn't run larger geo surveys to understand how their advertising impacted revenue?

This is fascinating stuff, thank you for sharing!

It's nothing too crazy, simply that for brand awareness campaigns to work, or even collect the market research data that you are talking about you need to spend significant money for a decent period of time. Something that smaller companies tend to not have while they are focusing on starting predictable growth and product market fit more than scale. Smaller companies will invest in marketing that has some guarantees of performance like retargeting, email or search rather than brand.

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