Programmatic Platforms Face Pressure to Reduce Client Fees, Infrastructure Costs

Definitely. It’s growing very fast because of header bidding. At peak times, we are at 2 million queries per second. In 2015, it was something like 300,000. It’s hard to draw a direct cause and effect because we have more clients now. But overall, I think maybe 50% of the increase [in bids per second] is because of header bidding. But that’s a rough estimation because it’s very hard to set accurate parameters.

For us, maintenance cost is a very small share of our expenses. We build out infrastructure in a very efficient way. I assume that for the major DSPs, [the increase in bids per second] could be a very big problem.

We use quite cheap hardware servers instead of the cloud. Basically, it requires more people to maintain because it’s more sophisticated than just keeping everything stored with Amazon or Google, but it’s still 10 times cheaper.

We have our own algorithm to avoid [duplicate bids], but it’s just the beginning of this. Basically it’s win-rate optimization. The idea is that we can use historical data from advertisers and based on this data, our artificial intelligence creates this probability model. For each impression, we know the probability of who is most likely to buy this impression.

Yes, it’s going down every quarter because competition is tough. Commission-based pricing [rates in the ad industry] are going down.

A year ago, 20% was very OK. But right now, it’s very hard to sometimes get 10%. People want to pay less.

Our average check is growing and we’re getting bigger clients. If we onboard someone big, even if they only pay us 8%, the absolute numbers still give us big revenue. So the goal is to grow the average check and to onboard more big clients.

Yes. It’s on the campaign-management level, so agencies can easily use it when they set up new campaigns. It’s a very popular feature; all the agencies use it.