Untangling Header Bidding Lore

Abstract

Header bidding (HB) is a relatively new online advertising technology that allows a content publisher to conduct a client-side (i.e., from within the end-user’s browser), real-time auction for selling ad slots on a web page. We developed a new browser extension for Chrome and Firefox to observe this in-browser auction process from the user’s perspective. We use real end-user measurements from 393,400 HB auctions to (a) quantify the ad revenue from HB auctions, (b) estimate latency overheads when integrating with ad exchanges and discuss their implications for ad revenue, and (c) break down the time spent in soliciting bids from ad exchanges into various factors and highlight areas for improvement. For the users in our study, we find that HB increases ad revenue for web sites by 28% compared to that in real-time bidding as reported in a prior work. We also find that the latency overheads in HB can be easily reduced or eliminated and outline a few solutions, and pitch the HB platform as an opportunity for privacy-preserving advertising.