• by Tobi Elkin , Staff Writer @tobielkin, September 6, 2016

Now that the Labor Day holiday is behind us and summer’s in the rearview mirror, Q4 buzz is ramping up.

Let’s see: Accordant Media was acquired by Dentsu Aegis last week, The  Trade Desk and AppNexus are both preparing to go public and have made new high-profile hires, Facebook has entered heading bidding, and that’s just scratching the surface. Advertising Week in New York, the last week in September, is coming up and always brings more hype than news. But we’ll be here to report it, regardless.

But Facebook’s recent entry into header bidding got RTBlog thinking. The move definitely aims to disrupt Google’s hegemony where publishers and their inventory is concerned. But there’s also something else at play:

Prior to Facebook’s decision to enter header bidding, it was largely on its own with its own ad exchange. It placed ads on the  right-hand rail and targeted based on its own data. But after it signed deals with partners that enabled it to serve ads based on offline behavior and in-store purchases, it seems that Facebook decided it wanted to extend its reach to the Web at large. That led to its acquisitions of Atlas and LiveRail.

Now, as we all know, LiveRail is gone and Atlas is being used as a so-called “people-based” cross-device and attribution tool.  

Facebook, taking a page from Google, saw that it could protect all of its data and gather even more insights on consumer behavior outside of its  “walled garden." This approach mounts a challenge to Google and other buyers for in-browser ads.

Facebook’s entry into header may be a bad thing for publishers that already have too many header-bidding partners. It’s a lot of work to manage all the partners and there are latency issues. Sell-side companies that offer header-bidding technology will now have to compete with one another for the remaining ad slots. Of course we know that this will lead to industry consolidation, which RTBlog thinks is a good thing.

Facebook’s entry into header bidding is a bit of a double-edged sword. It might be seen as good for publishers that can increase their CPMs -- but on the down side, publishers are being pressured to drive audiences to their owned-and-operated sites. A Facebook header-bidding solution looks like another sign that publishers are losing control of their business to Google and Facebook.

Even though Facebook will drive demand at a higher CPM than in the open market, there is a down side for the publishing industry. As publishers continue to rely on Facebook, their power will be diluted and content commoditized. 

Recently, when Facebook changed its news feed algorithm to prioritize posts from users’ family and friends, by putting its users first, it impacted the traffic of many publishers. So what's a publisher to do?