What we learned about programmatic from studying the ads.txt files of Australia’s top domains
Automatad’s Vamsi Krishna and Rasheed Ahamed had been wondering about the state of programatic selling in Australia – so they decided to take things into their own hands.
Zenith’s latest programmatic marketing forecast predicts over two-thirds of Australian digital display ad spend will be bought through programmatic platforms by 2020. The report also expects that the total programmatic ad spend will rise to $2.92bn by next year.
But the prediction is far from answering any specific questions. What percentage of publishers are actually using programmatic channels to sell their impressions? Who is the preferred monetization partner?
So, we decided to take a look at the state of programmatic selling in Australia by studying the ads.txt files of the top 2000 domains in the country.
Looks like AU market is yet to catchup with regards to programmatic.
any one aware of average CMPS top publishers get here ?
Barely enough to keep the life-support machine beeping… Only publishers with huge volumes of inventory can make a 100% programmatic world work unless the editorial cost are very very low. Sadly that means “Good-bye” to quality content and good user experience and “hello” to sites optimised for advertising with multiple ads on screen, often conflicting brands, ads that follow you to ensure video is played/viewed and about 3 lines of cut n paste content per screen.
Stopped reading at:
AdSense, which is an ad network (non-programmatic)
AdSense is Google’s small scale publisher network, built upon AdX and very much programmatic.
Hey RJ,
Here’s why we segmented Google AdSense from the rest.
Google AdSense conducts an auction where winning bid is based on the Quality score, not just the highest bidder.
So, when we mention ‘programmatic’ we are considering real-time bidding environment where media transaction happens based on the data, price, environment, etc – not on any propriety factor. Ad server gets to decide who wins the impressions.
Also, as you could see, one of the purposes of the study is to let the publishers know how top 2k domains are selling their impressions so that they can steer their strategies accordingly. If we’ve included AdSense as programmatic, there’s no value added. AdSense is something you use for backfill or at the start if you don’t have any options available.
Thanks!