Idea 9 : Client Side SSP II
So I poked some holes in my own client side SSP idea yesterday and I went back to the think through the details. So what went wrong?
- Reporting was a big unknown
- Ad Blocking is the issue
- Who handles the $
- How does the developer of this make money
Let’s jump into a few of these as I think there are simple solutions to some of these.
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Reporting was the biggest miss from my side, if you just have client side ssp capabilities how do you know who won the auction and at what price? Simple you host an analytics type server for customers. No Auction to run, no DSP connections to hook up, just take a feed of data from the client side about the auction dynamics so that customers can get their stats. Low cost, low option.
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How do we get around ad blocking? This one is harder but there are solutions especially since the SSP will be hosted on the same domain as the property. You still have outgoing requests to the DSP’s right? Maybe, in it’s most basic form yes you do and there is nothing to solve that if you don’t want to set up infra. But if your willing to host a few simple proxy servers all that changes, your ssp will talk to your proxy who will send the requests. Small to mid sized publishers doing this won’t need much here, we could even dockerize these to make install simple. This is getting more complex though. Maybe we could CNAME this service for them as part of the hosted part of this solution.
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The money is something most of the SSP’s handle if you want them to so we likely need to do the same at some point. Maybe not at the offset but at some point in the future. Use the Analytics servers that we’re hosting to capture the data and build out the reporting and billing capabilities to deal with the DSP’s.
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Feels like three options here off the top of my head.
- Act as an exchange for these customers and set up managed deals with the DSP’s that you offer. If you bring demand they will come, it’s been proven time and time again.
- Charge a service fee for the Analytics server use.
- Change a service fee if they want us to handle the $