Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) program has helped publishers drastically reduce page load times on the mobile web. The technology works by stripping away all non-essential page components and third-party scripts. Whenever you see the bolt icon next to a webpage, it means that the page will load within a fraction of the time taken by a regular HTML webpage. But AMP i … [Read more...]
Chrome’s New “Blink LazyLoad” Feature May Hurt Publisher Revenues
Lazy loading, the practice of loading media assets (images, ads, etc…) only when the user scrolls down the webpage to view them, has been around for a while. It helps save bandwidth and makes web pages load faster, and is typically implemented using JavaScript. But now a new Chrome feature is bringing lazy-loading support as a browser default. What is Blink L … [Read more...]
Google Starts ‘Subscription Lab’, Launches New Fact-Checking Tools
Google launched the Google News Initiative in 2018 to help the news industry evolve better business models, increasing the quality of journalism, fighting misinformation, and driving tech innovation in newsrooms. Google even earmarked $300 million for the program. One year after its launch, Google has provided updates on its progress and new developments. Pivot to … [Read more...]
What is Bid Shading and How Does it Impact Publishers?
Bid shading is a term that’s suddenly showing up everywhere in ad tech as the industry-wide shift from second-price auctions to first-price auctions is taking place. So, what exactly is bid shading? And how does it work? How does it affect advertisers and publishers? That’s what we’re going to discuss in this post. Moving from the second-price auction world Before we di … [Read more...]
Google Ad Manager Switches to First-price Auction for Programmatic Display, Video
Second-price auctions have long been the industry norm in programmatic advertising. Now in a big move, Google has announced that its Ad Manager suite of products will be transitioning to the first-price auction model by the end of this year. Google’s decision comes amid growing voices in the ad tech industry calling for simplicity and transparency. A number of ad exchanges, i … [Read more...]
How Publishers Can Create Better Ad Experiences (and Why it’s Important)
A new report published by GlobalWebIndex estimates that ad block usage in the US currently stands at 40% for laptops and 15% for mobile devices. Roughly speaking, that’s almost half the ad revenue that a publisher could have been earning—gone, just like that. Apart from quantitative analysis such as adoption numbers, device penetration, and country-wise usage data, res … [Read more...]
AdSense CPM Rates: Factors that Affect How Much You Can Earn
Quora and AdSense help forums are littered with questions about how much you can earn with AdSense, AdSense CPM ad rates, and the like. Since AdSense CPM rates are variable, it leads to a lot of speculation among publishers. Here are a few such questions: How much can I earn with 1000 visitors / day with AdSense?What factors affect AdSense CPM?How much traffic will I need to … [Read more...]
The Best SSPs (Supply-Side Platforms) for Web Publishers
In a recent post, we covered what supply-side platforms are, how they work, the benefits of using an SSP, how they differ from demand-side platforms, and how to choose the right SSP. To recap: "A supply-side platform is a technology platform that enables web publishers to manage their ad inventory, fill it with ads, and generate ad revenue." That's a really basic … [Read more...]
Auto Ads: Everything You Need to Know About This AdSense Feature
15 years after its launch, Google AdSense still remains the primary source of monetization for a majority of web publishers, with over 11.1 million websites using the ad network. AdSense is easy to get started with, and gives publishers access to the Google Display Network (GDN)—one of the largest pool of ad demand in the world that offers close to 100% fill rate. However, s … [Read more...]
5 Ad Tech Predictions for 2019
2018 was a mixed year for publishers, advertisers, and ad tech in general. Ads.txt helped introduce some much needed transparency into the ad tech supply chain, GDPR and consent management caused some to adapt and many others to throw in the towel, Index Exchange raised a storm with its bid caching debacle, and Amazon aggressively grew its ad tech business, while global ad … [Read more...]