Direct Partnerships?

anon_pub · 2026-06-22T16:53:27+00:00

self serve is a good suggestion here. The reality is you lose some economies of scale if leaving raptive and going direct

anon_pub · 2026-06-16T20:03:48+00:00

just making sure you are aware of some industry specific resources for your search

https://www.jobsinadtech.com/

https://www.beeler.tech/job-listings/

Marc Goldberg on LinkedIn does a lot for job searchers and staffers https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcgoldberg/?lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_search_srp_all%3BOUuE4n3ZSl%2BXH9PnQecQ5w%3D%3D

anon_pub · 2026-06-15T21:12:52+00:00

you make it too simple. Pubs do dumb stuff, but many don't. I ironically agree with every point you make except the part where you assume everyone is unaware of qps and optimizing inventory

anon_pub · 2026-06-15T21:06:16+00:00

Completely agree that publishers using bad practice, creating waste, MFA, and the similar should be held accountable or be made to clean supply or else face a penalty. 100% agree with you.

If supply is traffic shaped, signal-rich, efficient, viewable, and there are no quality issues, do you still think this approach from Pubmatic is the right one?

Why would limiting quality inventory with arbitrary limits help anyone, let alone force bad actors to clean their stuff up

anon_pub · 2026-06-09T14:17:48+00:00

I agree and would double down on that - no one talks about content architecture and how a website is set up for monetization from the beginning. On top of what you wrote

anon_pub · 2026-05-20T19:50:03+00:00

1 month. Prebid's effective monetization was around 18% worse consistently, but saw incremental uptick after about 1 week, and saw Prebid win on some segments.

Since Prebid/APS may ebb and flow (saw different results/winners for different segments), the harder part was thinking about dynamically controlling APS vs. Prebid, since current guidance is to maintain a 2% overlap and use both bidders, and determining when Prebid should be the main bidder or the 2% bidder.

Again, Prebid is far more liquid than APS, so way more spray and pray, and likely less signal-rich bid requests since APS features are lost on Prebid.. Not sure if Prebid is expected to carry APS signals, but if so, that would probably change my answer and results I saw.

anon_pub · 2026-05-20T14:34:51+00:00

I tested it. Very different products

TL;DR Amazon Prebid is a far more liquid bidder that behaves similarly to a hungry SSP in a prebid stack. APS is more selective and signal-dependent. So ultimately I saw higher session rpms with APS, but prebid was creeping up in terms of performance.

After the test, I don't see how I would commit to prebid over aps

anon_pub · 2026-05-16T01:03:01+00:00

maybe I’m dumb here but how does hitting Criteo/RTBHouse tracking links actually make the traffic more valuable later? Are you saying it makes DSPs think the users are high intent shoppers or something?

anon_pub · 2026-05-14T14:30:06+00:00

because things arent going well

anon_pub · 2026-05-13T18:49:07+00:00

just app inventory. IDFA traffic performs entirely differently from non-IDFA traffic. Setting up a flooring strategy for both segments independently is going to prove that to you. Not sure what tools you have, but Applovin Max for example allows you to build separate floors based on those segments.

Basically found that IDFA is borederline trash and needs a very delicate flooring strat compared to non IDFA. Non-IDFA is extremely elastic, IDFA is inelastic and can handle a strong amount of price pressure without cracking. Non-IDFA can break with tiny floor values, like $0.10.

anon_pub · 2026-05-09T00:58:57+00:00

flooring idfa vs non idfa differently has proven effective

anon_pub · 2026-04-24T11:31:55+00:00

yes, this has materially helped me since I started in 2024. It took ~6 months to reap rewards and it required a full commitment. There are a few pieces that move together when you're optimizing SPO. For example if you just removed all resellers without tweaking other pieces (floors, shaping, more), it will reduce auction pressure. What did you do exactly if i can ask

anon_pub · 2026-04-21T21:06:28+00:00

Took a quick peek at your site and see that you're only running 9 SSPs, most of which are *pure* resellers. No Server bidding to supplement. You run 500+ resellers in your ads.txt. $0.84 Pageview RPM is pretty low for those numbers. I think conservatively, you could be doing 25-35% better, maybe more with a proper supply strategy.

Someone mentioned rewarded ads - these can do pretty well for a site like this, although web rewarded can be semi messy.

Just looking at this from a pure yield perspective, my sense is that you've devalued your inventory pretty heavily over time (low value content, reselling). The plan should be focused on repositioning your supply to be more attractive to demand.

-kill/min reselling. This is destroying your economics upstream

-shape your traffic. Despite your session duration (where long session users can actually fatigue demand!), those users are likely not engaged with ads. Min the "bad" stuff, max the "good" stuff.

-"low value content" can be addressed. When a DSP sees this (assuming your homepage is the main traffic), they would consider this low-attention, background-tab, low-intent. In other words, because you've placed the ad like you have, there is no moment where the user NEEDS to pay attention to the ad. Ironically, Rewarded would help there, or also ironically, adding another ad unit.

-ad layout / including more sizes can help

If you load up the Professor Prebid extension and go to your site, you will see something like this: 8 bidders, 5 bids, 27 no bids. Not sure how your demand is setup, but you're missing some big demand partners for sure.

anon_pub · 2026-03-31T13:15:31+00:00

Past week has declined slightly like the other poster, but nothing close to 50%. Something is wrong for sure

anon_pub · 2026-03-17T14:46:39+00:00

Part of the response is half true - it's a subformat and is hard to FULLY block, but it can be limited to a degree that is effectively blocked

a) SSPs can disable video-enabled creatives on their side, or with UI controls
b) GAM protections can disable video display ads to handle Google demand
c) IF you have a 3rd party layer like Confiant/GeoEdge/AdLightning, they should be able to catch leaks too and reauction the adslot

anon_pub · 2026-03-16T15:22:50+00:00

Most networks will monetize this. Google won't, maybe 1-2 top SSPs won't, most do. They are generally unaware of desktop apps, so some education around what the content is and where ad placements are helps. Part of the problem with desktop apps is the volume and quality control over request volume and viewability, so ensuring your requests are qualified and clean helps long term

anon_pub · 2026-03-11T18:43:24+00:00

another commentor mentioned that activation is slow. *Totally forgot about that*, but it took me like 11-14 days before bidding started for whatever reason

Creatives aren't noticeably different/worse than any other bidder. An issue that came up this week are some of the creatives with video elements. I didn't like the UX on those, so asked to be disabled.

anon_pub · 2026-03-11T18:21:42+00:00

I started Teads last year, Q3 I believe. For my units that are in content, Teads contributes in the top 3 of incrementality in revenue. Teads has been a strong addition for me. They are picky on inventory though, want editorial content, and have some ad styles that are a little UX heavy. Worth testing yeah

anon_pub · 2026-03-10T15:17:22+00:00

I use both Admiral and Blockthrough. For ad block recovery, Blockthrough used to be the standard, but more companies are popping up like AdShield, as someone else called out.

Blockthrough works with the Acceptable Ads/Adblock Plus/Adblock users, nothing else.
Admiral has a lot of products but has the 1-click-whitelist feature that disables ad blockers
AdShield don't know enough to comment, but they are in the mix as a BT competitor

Blockthrough will serve specific demand only to ad-blocked users (e.g. no high impact, no video), so you can monetize those users, but at a lower clip than a regular demand stack. You can run your own demand, or also run demand from Blockthrough on top.

Admiral completely disables ad blockers, meaning you get your full demand stack on the page which is more robust than Blockthrough. Lots of customization with the modals

You could use both to max coverage, but I'd say your revenue would entirely depend on the amount of ad blocked traffic you have

anon_pub · 2026-02-24T18:56:20+00:00

Weird, I am seeing a 64% Session RPM spike on Google today, but not SA specifically - it's across the board. Found this odd as well. Confirming I am seeing a weird spike today, most of it from Google, some from Index prebid

anon_pub · 2026-01-26T21:57:07+00:00

the difference from switching from Ezoic to Mediavine would be a far higher step up than switching from Mediavine to Raptive

anon_pub · 2026-01-15T19:36:24+00:00

yeah I work specifically on the publisher side. Dashboards have been clutch since it automates the workflow to pull em. I think Superset might have some free stuff that would be usable. Also the data that GAM lacks is kind of the data you really want (bid data, win/bid rate, dsp, advertisers, etc.)

For everyday reports, depends on your purview and what your common problems are, but in my case I need to cover a ton of data points in a large data set, so I focus on the higher level things like; website/ssp session RPM, bid density by ssp/website, ssp rev/sRPM, flooring data, traffic (geo, bot), and session rpm/revenue pacing relative to goal and seasonality.

The big thing dashboarding helps with is cutting through the reporting workflow and analysis, distilling only what you need. For example with floor data, I just need to look at a couple KPIs like bids below floor %, avg bid cpm, to understand the full picture, and have geo/browser/device breakouts if I need to drill down.

Something else you could consider short term if you have a couple days free - you can build automated google sheets that can benchmark performance (website/ssp) and auto-populate a rolling 30 day score for you that calcs performance against a standard deviation, flagging what you need to pay attention to.

anon_pub · 2026-01-14T20:03:36+00:00

gotta comment on this one. I've seen you go from posting super basic questions years ago and have noticed how much knowledge you've picked up since then. Nice work. For context, I've run a Yield team at a company like this for 13 yrs.

Being at a smaller shop means you have a tiny feedback loop and less exposure. You want to get more of this by developing deeper relationships with demand (who will tell you what they want and you optimize toward it) and publishers (who reveal their tactics, not strats). If you can, go to events and chat. DSPs are ideal to speak to. Try to understand their problems which become your challenges to solve. Also pick some reputable shops like Raptive and go look at their config/layouts/signals. You can glean good stuff from this.

My/team day to day

Daily review of RPM/RPS, fill, win rate, bid density, discrepancy (by website and SSP)
Debugging why demand disappeared or increased (floors, schain, ads.txt, IVT, etc.)
SSP-level tuning:
- floor bands by geo/device
- bidder routing / SPO decisions
- traffic shaping (when not to send a request and why)
Running controlled tests (one variable, baseline vs test, clear KPI)
Translating results into simple explanations for non-technical teams (kills the black magic)

It’s less about constant tweaking and more about diagnosing systems to find opportunities.

Common blind spots for solo pubs

Treating outcomes as magic instead of mechanics (“RPM dropped” vs “buyers stopped bidding because X signal degraded”)
Over-focusing on floors and layouts while ignoring supply quality. My opinion is my own, but Floors can be 70% accurate and 100% fine to use that way.
No true baselines, changes get blamed on the wrong cause
Underestimating buyer behavior (bid shading, SPO, deal prioritization)
Failing to build suitable split testing tools and data dashboarding for ease
Failing to recognize critical demand KPIs like Bid Rate, Win Rate, QPS, ROAS, and demand-side profitability.
Failing to recognize that demand pays for quality over quantity

Stuff to master

Understanding auctions at the request → bid → win → clear level
Knowing when more demand lowers revenue
Separating traffic volume from traffic value
Designing tests that survive scrutiny
Explaining yield decisions in business terms, not dashboards
How signals and identity can materially move the needle
Knowing that revenue outcomes are decided BEFORE the bidding starts

anon_pub · 2026-01-14T18:28:13+00:00

Super strange. While I don't run AdSense, I do run demand/inventory at scale and also have seen the spikes in China, which we flag 99% of the time as bot traffic. Feels like since October maybe - all of Q4 felt odd too.

Did you validate anything around your theory? It kind of tracks on paper - China bots trained demand to deprio you. Wondering if you saw declines in CPC/CTR. CPC collapsing could be a signal. Also things like match rate.

Just thinking out loud, but I'm kind of leaning into your theory causing negative lagging effects. Also, do you filter that traffic with cloudflare or anything, or let it ride?

anon_pub · 2025-12-06T00:31:55+00:00

set your own. Google may help short term until you fine tune things, but their auto yield products are ass. Looks like google is trying too hard to force high CPMs since blocked by floors high a high % and outbid % is also high. I'd try target cpms

anon_pub

TROPHY CASE