Publishers rarely get the opportunity to discuss their problems with monetization. The issues keep boiling in a closed cooking pot of the sell side. It was quite natural, that when premium publishers got together, lots of issues were voiced.

Digiday gathered 300 publishers and ad tech representatives for its Programmatic Media Summit in New Orleans on November 13-15. The event resulted in findings on key issues that worry the sell side of ad delivery.

Want to know you’re not alone with your troubles?

Here’s the list of questions that other publishers have to the industry:

• High fees for publishers with high CPM,
• Too many resellers, no transparency from SSPs,
• Customer support specialists with no practical knowledge,
• Scaling the PMPs,
• and the Ad fraud.

Premium publishers want a better reporting system

Header Bidding promised new advantages. This made it popular real fast. More publishers started using it. And now we have the key weak points to strengthen.

Publishers don’t know what happens in wrappers. Most wrappers transmit the data from SSPs. The data from DSPs is missing. The latter includes the info on the spends, both of an advertiser and a brand. Publishers also reported the situations when the same advertiser came through different SSPs.

Header Bidding remains a thing for major publishers. Smaller ones fail to use it. This keeps the technology in its premature state. There is the logical need for a strong partner.

In-house products fail to be viable

Not each publisher can build an ad server of one’s own. It takes time and energy.

Publishers, who tried to build their servers in house, spent too much time and couldn’t get it done. But they couldn’t get angry at the dev team. Skilled ad tech developers are rare among human resources.

Turning to vendors is a nice alternative. These can endure your discontent.

Seriously though, the vendors with their ad servers hoard valuable expertise. The market of technologies gets complicated pretty fast. The specialists on the side of premium publishers complain about the complexity of the setup and the KPIs matching. The help from the third part might solve lots of problems.