Content websites are supported by advertising. Most of the advertisements around the internet are dynamic ad slots that change depending on the user who visits the site. Those dynamic ad slots are available to a variety of different bidders. For each ad slot, an auction occurs. The highest bidder gets to serve an ad for that slot.

Praneet Sharma is the co-founder of Method Media Intelligence, which he founded with Shailin Dhar, who has been on the show several times to discuss his investigations into the world of ad fraud. I wanted to have his partner Praneet on the show to get his perspective on ad fraud and how to clean up the advertising ecosystem.

One advance in dynamic advertising that we discussed is header bidding, and an open source library called PrebidJS.

When an ad-supported website gets delivered to your web browser, the HTML begins to load and the JavaScript on the page begins to execute. Some of that JavaScript is calling out to advertising networks looking for the highest bidder. Until the page receives a callback for what to put in the ad slots on the page, the page will not finish loading. Sites that do not manage their ad requests appropriately suffer performance issues.

Header bidding is a technique to wrap all of the requests to different advertising exchanges in a single serialized blob of code at the top of the page.

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