• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, August 4, 2016

Aiming to expand its focus on header bidding, AppNexus on Thursday announced the relaunch of its full header bidding stack of solutions, adding new services and analytics offerings to its existing technology.

The ad tech firm’s PreBid Enterprise product is a header bidding solution with services that includes open source wrapper technology powered by prebid.js, integrations with demand sources including AppNexus supply-side-platform (SSP) services, and analytics that offer publishers  tools for monetizing their inventory.

Header bidding has been popular among ad-tech firms as a way to help publishers increase scale and improve inventory monetization. For publishers that are unable to migrate their ad serving from Google’s DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP), header bidding opens up additional demand sources that compete for every impression, allowing publishers to earn what their inventory is truly worth. Using prebid.js, publishers can integrate and manage multiple header bidding partners without latency or impacting the user experience.

Since AppNexus launched its Prebid.js header bidding solution a year ago, more than 200 publishers representing more than 10,000 websites have adopted it. Most of those publishers are leveraging the AppNexus SSP as a header bidding demand source.

“Over the past year, we’ve seen substantial market demand for header bidding. Publishers that can't currently migrate off of DFP want to access demand sources directly, without paying the AdX tax,” Pat McCarthy, SVP product, Publisher Technology Group, AppNexus, told Real-Time Daily via email. “Publishers that use header bidding see significant revenue lift. Our wrapper solution combines powerful, open-source technology, services, and analytics to help digital publishers get the best price possible for their inventory. It keeps them from being locked into the DFP/AdX arrangement. That’s a solution that everyone can get behind — except, perhaps, Google.”

“AppNexus has reinforced its expertise as an end-to-end header bidding partner by contributing to our monetization efforts, resulting in nearly double our CPMs over other demand sources and lifting our header bidder fill rates by almost 50%,” stated Carrie Atwood, programmatic partnership manager at InfoSpace, the owner and operator of websites including HowStuffWorks.

AppNexus rival Rubicon Project on Tuesday saw its desktop managed revenue decline 2% in the second quarter and experienced a loss of $234 million for the quarter. Rubicon CEO Frank Addante told investors that the company was slow to recognize how important of header bidding was to its publisher customers. Rubicon didn’t launch its FastLane header bidding product until October 2015, months after the technology became popular.