Annotated: Managing Commoditization and Exchanges

“While it is in everyone’s best interest (theoretically) to have fewer, better performing ads on a page, in an exchange where little is known about any given placement, a bad actor can exploit good actors in the system to unfairly maximize his yield at the expense of other players. This results in a prisoners dilemma situation. The result is that, in many tests, publishers may find themselves in a death spiral of adding more ads to inventory to increase the effective yield of a page.”

- Cogblog » Blog Archive » Managing Commoditization and Exchanges

Interesting perspective, and definitely one of the challenges when it comes to network buys in general, not just on exchanges.

But one of the main ideas behind DSPs is the benchmarking of sites/URLs across clients and campaigns. Granted, we don’t always have the URL on Doubleclick’s Exchange and it depends on publisher preferences, but frankly right now inventory liquidity is the biggest problem.