In its white paper, Rubicon Project articulates that proprietary wrappers may undermine the growth and monetization alternatives of both publishers and the ad tech environment as a complete due to implicit restricted nature of those wrappers and their owners. Not only do proprietary wrappers pose conflicts of interest leading to unintelligent inventory allocation, but they lock in publishers, lack crowd sourced checks and balances, and stop publishers from taking full potential of the industry’s collective learnings through the years. They also require significant development time for updates, which obviously prioritizes the owning entity’s trade, finally compromising publisher income potential. “Header bidding should increase publisher income and supply a more equitable and transparent environment — that was its fundamental intent.
Unfortunately, many proprietary wrappers and “black box” server side strategies have in fact undermined these key principles of accessibility, competitors, and efficiency,” said Tom Kershaw, Chief Technology Officer, Rubicon Project. “It is critical to the long term good fortune of buyers and sellers that we work as a group and expand an industry first attitude to open, standardized implementations of both client and server side header bidding.