• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, May 23, 2017

Criteo has launched a new header bidding product, Direct Bidder, that it said will help publishers retain the full value of their inventory and receive 50% higher revenues on average.

Direct Bidder offers a unified auction across all demand sources and connect publishers’ inventory to Criteo’s ad network of more than 15,000 advertiser clients.

The company said it eliminates third-party fees and helps publishers boost the monetization of their inventory without increasing Criteo’s CPMs or total acquisition costs, or lowering advertisers’ return on investment.

Criteo said Direct Bidder also seeks to monetize publishers’ ad-blocked impressions, simplifies the publisher’s ad server setup to encourage more yield from Criteo’s ad network and offers real-time cookie-matching.

“Up until now, header bidder has worked to improve many of the problems of real-time programmatic. Direct Bidder gives better control of auctions with greater transparency to publishers providing the ability to generate greater value for their inventory," Marc Grabowski, EVP, global supply and business development, Criteo, told Real-Time Daily via email.

He said Direct Bidder has yielded 20% to 40% higher revenue.

Criteo's move into header bidding is significant because it’s such a big buyer, according to  Karsten Weide, program vice president, digital media and entertainment, IDC, who said it should be good for publishers that want to see greater demand for their supply and higher prices, while buyers, presumably, will get access to more and better-performing inventory.

“Header bidding is upending the display ad space," said Weide. "There is already a lot of managed revenue that goes through header bidding. By my estimate, in the U.S., in 2015, there was about $400 million in header-bidding-based spending, but last year, 2016, this grew more than six-fold, to $2.4 billion.”

Weide said he expects spending to more than double in 2017 with most of that coming at the expense of private marketplaces (PMPs).

“By my estimate, at the end of this year, three quarters of the PMP business will be header-bidding-based," he added.

"But some of that growth will come out of what is now still direct sales. I think that by the end of this year, as much as 40% of what still is direct sales might go through header bidding. There may be even more growth after that if buyers decide they don’t need guaranteed inventory for their campaigns anymore because they feel they can get pretty much any inventory at any time.”