New OpenX Survey Highlights Opportunities for Publishers within Prebid

Publishers understand the revenue opportunities with Prebid, but see huge room for growth

Los Angeles — March 25, 2021 — OpenX today released the findings of a recent survey that examines how digital media publishers are using Prebid to manage their programmatic advertising. The survey highlights the importance of Prebid in terms of generating and maximizing revenue, with over 75 percent of publishers reporting that they find Prebid to be a “critical aspect” of their revenue. 

While publishers acknowledge the impact Prebid can have on their bottom line, many publishers feel they could be doing more, and only 8 percent of pubs were very satisfied with the programmatic revenue they were currently bringing in. Only 18 percent of publishers felt that they were getting everything out of Prebid that they could. 

The survey generated responses from 381 people in the publishing community with 36 percent coming from large publishers that generate more than 1 billion ad requests a month. When contrasting answers from large publishers with those from smaller publishers, it is clear that large publishers are able to experiment more in order to drive as much revenue as possible. Publishers with more than 1B requests/month were more than 2X as likely to use multiple Prebid configurations than publishers with less than a billion monthly requests. 

Other highlights from the report include:

• There is a need for easily accessible actionable insights. Over 50 percent of publishers feel like it’s hard to get actionable insights from Prebid, and only 4 percent felt strongly that they could easily get these insights
• Many publishers want to update Prebid more often. 42 percent of publishers would like to change their Prebid setup more frequently. Smaller publishers are 3X more likely to never update their stack than a publisher with over 1B requests/month.
• There are mixed feelings about how difficult Prebid is to manage. 37 percent of pubs feel that Prebid is too time consuming to manage, and 27 percent of publishers feel it is difficult to set up. 

“Prebid has filled a real gap in the market, providing an open source solution for publishers that gives them control and visibility over their stack,” said Rich Calkins, Senior Product Manager at OpenX. “What the survey shows, however, is that Prebid is in many ways still an untapped opportunity. Publishers understand the revenue potential of Prebid, but many are not necessarily satisfied with what they are seeing today. As a community of companies that contribute code to Prebid, this is something that we need to work on fixing, making sure that we are setting up publishers to succeed and really unlock the full potential of Prebid.”

To view additional findings from the report, visit https://blog.openx.com/the-pulse-on-prebid and for more information on the study, email research@openx.com.

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About OpenX

OpenX is a pioneering leader in advertising technology, helping create a world where the open web thrives. The company powers people-based marketing on the open web by enabling marketers to reach their target audience across OpenX’s global network of publishers. OpenX works with more than 30,000 advertisers across every screen and device, reaching nearly one billion consumers – including a quarter billion unique consumers in the US – and processing more than one trillion transactions globally each day.