* . *
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact
Tuesday, September 30, 2025
Earth-News
  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment
    The Police Made Chart History With This 1979 Hit Nearly 50 Years Ago – Yahoo

    How The Police Changed Music Forever with Their Iconic 1979 Hit Nearly 50 Years Ago

    Good Deed Entertainment Acquires Worldwide Rights To Liza Mandelup’s Documentary ‘Caterpillar’ – Deadline

    Good Deed Entertainment Lands Global Rights to Liza Mandelup’s Captivating Documentary ‘Caterpillar

    Danielle Fishel Explains Why Being on “DWTS” Makes Her Feel ‘Like It’s 1994 Again’ Filming “Boy Meets World” (Exclusive) – Yahoo

    Danielle Fishel Explains Why Being on “DWTS” Makes Her Feel ‘Like It’s 1994 Again’ Filming “Boy Meets World” (Exclusive) – Yahoo

    Jussie Smollett Claims He Was ‘Disrespected’ on the ‘Special Forces’ Season Premiere – Yahoo

    Jussie Smollett Opens Up About Feeling ‘Disrespected’ During the ‘Special Forces’ Season Premiere

    TicketSmarter Fall Entertainment Guide – Eastern Illinois University Athletics

    TicketSmarter Fall Entertainment Guide – Eastern Illinois University Athletics

    Cardi B Adds More Dates to Little Miss Drama Tour: ‘Y’all Making Me Work’ – Yahoo

    Cardi B Extends Little Miss Drama Tour: “Y’all Making Me Work

  • General
  • Health
  • News

    Cracking the Code: Why China’s Economic Challenges Aren’t Shaking Markets, Unlike America’s” – Bloomberg

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Trending Tags

    • Trump Inauguration
    • United Stated
    • White House
    • Market Stories
    • Election Results
  • Science
  • Sports
  • Technology
    Saving Energy and Money with Smart Technology – Terms of Service with Clare Duffy – Podcast on CNN Podcasts – CNN

    Saving Energy and Money with Smart Technology – Terms of Service with Clare Duffy – Podcast on CNN Podcasts – CNN

    Four Strategic Signals Technology Leaders Are Tuning In To – SPONSOR CONTENT FROM ARM – Harvard Business Review

    Four Essential Strategic Signals Every Technology Leader Should Watch

    Virginia Tech hosts annual New Music + Technology Festival this week – Cardinal News

    Virginia Tech Kicks Off Exciting Annual New Music and Technology Festival This Week

    Why I gave the world wide web away for free | Tim Berners-Lee – The Guardian

    Why I Decided to Make the World Wide Web Free for Everyone | Tim Berners-Lee

    From shale to steam: Fossil fuel technology boosts clean geothermal energy – Washington Examiner

    From Shale to Steam: How Fossil Fuel Technology is Powering a Clean Geothermal Energy Revolution

    How Sustainable Technology is Shaping a Greener Future – Technology Magazine

    How Sustainable Technology is Driving the Revolution Toward a Greener Future

    Trending Tags

    • Nintendo Switch
    • CES 2017
    • Playstation 4 Pro
    • Mark Zuckerberg
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment
    The Police Made Chart History With This 1979 Hit Nearly 50 Years Ago – Yahoo

    How The Police Changed Music Forever with Their Iconic 1979 Hit Nearly 50 Years Ago

    Good Deed Entertainment Acquires Worldwide Rights To Liza Mandelup’s Documentary ‘Caterpillar’ – Deadline

    Good Deed Entertainment Lands Global Rights to Liza Mandelup’s Captivating Documentary ‘Caterpillar

    Danielle Fishel Explains Why Being on “DWTS” Makes Her Feel ‘Like It’s 1994 Again’ Filming “Boy Meets World” (Exclusive) – Yahoo

    Danielle Fishel Explains Why Being on “DWTS” Makes Her Feel ‘Like It’s 1994 Again’ Filming “Boy Meets World” (Exclusive) – Yahoo

    Jussie Smollett Claims He Was ‘Disrespected’ on the ‘Special Forces’ Season Premiere – Yahoo

    Jussie Smollett Opens Up About Feeling ‘Disrespected’ During the ‘Special Forces’ Season Premiere

    TicketSmarter Fall Entertainment Guide – Eastern Illinois University Athletics

    TicketSmarter Fall Entertainment Guide – Eastern Illinois University Athletics

    Cardi B Adds More Dates to Little Miss Drama Tour: ‘Y’all Making Me Work’ – Yahoo

    Cardi B Extends Little Miss Drama Tour: “Y’all Making Me Work

  • General
  • Health
  • News

    Cracking the Code: Why China’s Economic Challenges Aren’t Shaking Markets, Unlike America’s” – Bloomberg

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Trending Tags

    • Trump Inauguration
    • United Stated
    • White House
    • Market Stories
    • Election Results
  • Science
  • Sports
  • Technology
    Saving Energy and Money with Smart Technology – Terms of Service with Clare Duffy – Podcast on CNN Podcasts – CNN

    Saving Energy and Money with Smart Technology – Terms of Service with Clare Duffy – Podcast on CNN Podcasts – CNN

    Four Strategic Signals Technology Leaders Are Tuning In To – SPONSOR CONTENT FROM ARM – Harvard Business Review

    Four Essential Strategic Signals Every Technology Leader Should Watch

    Virginia Tech hosts annual New Music + Technology Festival this week – Cardinal News

    Virginia Tech Kicks Off Exciting Annual New Music and Technology Festival This Week

    Why I gave the world wide web away for free | Tim Berners-Lee – The Guardian

    Why I Decided to Make the World Wide Web Free for Everyone | Tim Berners-Lee

    From shale to steam: Fossil fuel technology boosts clean geothermal energy – Washington Examiner

    From Shale to Steam: How Fossil Fuel Technology is Powering a Clean Geothermal Energy Revolution

    How Sustainable Technology is Shaping a Greener Future – Technology Magazine

    How Sustainable Technology is Driving the Revolution Toward a Greener Future

    Trending Tags

    • Nintendo Switch
    • CES 2017
    • Playstation 4 Pro
    • Mark Zuckerberg
No Result
View All Result
Earth-News
No Result
View All Result
Home General

WTF is traffic shaping? 

October 10, 2023
in General
WTF is traffic shaping? 
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

This article is a WTF explainer, in which we break down media and marketing’s most confusing terms. More from the series →

Originally published on July 5, 2023, this article has been updated to include an explainer video skit.

Traffic shaping has been used within the ad tech industry for a while, particularly by supply-side platforms (SSPs) and demand-side platforms (DSPs) filtering out available programmatic ad inventory that isn’t quite up to snuff before passing them along to media buyers and advertisers. 

Recently, however, a few publishers have started taking traffic shaping into their own hands for a variety of reasons, but with the ultimate goal of only putting their most premium ad inventory up for sale. 

“If we are sending texts that don’t get answered up to the buy side, we need to curb that behavior… so that we can be better partners to those working to represent our inventory for us. Ultimately, if I send more bid requests to an SSP partner that can be won, I become a more profitable publisher partner to my SSP because they no longer have to filter out as many unwitting or unsellable requests from me,” said Justin Wohl, CRO of Salon.com, TVTropes.org and Snopes.com. 

WTF is traffic shaping? 

Traffic shaping can be boiled down to publishers being more thoughtful about what ad requests are sent to intermediaries like SSPs. But it’s a rather “squishy” term, according to John Shankman, founder and CEO of Hashtag Labs, a company that provides ad ops solutions to publishers as well as tools that enable publishers to undergo traffic shaping.

For the majority of time that traffic shaping has existed, it’s been left up to SSPs and DSPs to handle, which they did by filtering ad requests based on categories — like geographies, browsers, devices, etc. — that advertisers ask for specifically. Now, publishers are either building the capabilities in-house or using tools provided by companies like Hashtag Labs to start filtering and reducing the number of ad requests they send out in the first place, to unclog the programmatic pipeline, so to speak.

“The publisher has always been told to send out as many ad requests as you can,” said Shankman. “And really, traffic shaping is the opposite of that in the sense of, let’s think about where we send out ad requests and what we send them out for.” He added that this is an evolution of the industry where publishers are finally able to have some access to those controls.

What does traffic shaping look like?

For a publisher, traffic shaping can come in a few different forms.

Requests by bidder 

Publishers can add parameters to the prebid code used to describe their ad units to SSPs to determine how and where their ad requests get sent out. This method allows a publisher to filter its ad requests by geographic location, device type and browser, which are lower hanging fruits, but they can go deeper into things like connection speed.

No ads if idle

Using their first-party data, publishers can determine when their users are active on their site, and if they measure inactivity for a prolonged amount of time, they can turn of ads on the page. This ensures that ads aren’t getting sold that will ultimately not be viewed by a user.

Throttling/Smarter requests

This is a form of performance-based traffic shaping where a publisher can pause ad requests that go to specific SSPs if they’re under-performing or continually sending bids that are below the publishers’ price floor for a prolonged period of time. After a certain period of time (which the publisher can experiment with), the SSP gets turned back on to see if their bids improve.

Hashtag Labs currently offers its clients two ways to implement traffic shaping: requests by bidder and throttling. Unwind Media, which publishes gaming sites Solitaired.com and Solitairebliss.com, has tested and implemented one of those strategies (by another name called “smarter requests”) as well as another strategy called “no ads if idle.”

How do publishers choose which form to use?

Emry Downinghall, svp of programmatic revenue and strategy at Unwind Media, said that so far the tests for no ads if idle and smarter requests have yielded positive results, without having a negative impact to revenue or performance.

No ads if idle

The sites that Unwind Media operate are casual gaming sites like Solitaire and FreeCell, which by nature gives the company a good amount of data into when site visitors are active or inactive on a page. If a user has been inactive for more than one minute, Downinghall said they stopped serving them ads. 

“We saw a 20% decline in desktop ad requests overall … And we saw a 12% increase in overall viewability for desktop,” Downinghall said. “A 12% increase in the viewability is meaningful and that was a great sign that can be linked to performance improvement, but I didn’t go into this test thinking we’re going to improve viewability. It was just an outcome.”

Overall, Unwind Media did serve fewer ads as a result, because if you’re sending fewer ad requests to SSPs, it’s natural that you’ll end up selling fewer ads. However, those ads that were dropped were already being sold “below the price floors that we were setting,” so it didn’t impact revenue, Dowinghall added.

As a warning to publishers, Dowinghall said he could see this test having a more negative impact on revenue depending on the site, but it’s all a function of A/B testing to figure out which factors and variables make the most sense. 

Throttling/Smarter requests

Unwind Media sells its ad units by individual user and session. For each unit, his team set up two parameters to determine whether or not it would continue to send ad requests to its SSPs. The first parameter was a specific period of time (in his case 3 minutes) and the second parameter was how many times an SSP responded to an ad request with a price below the company’s price floor (in his case 3 times). 

“If an SSP fails to respond three times in a row over three minutes, we stopped calling that SSP for that user,” said Downinghall, adding that after a period of time (which his team has experimented with in various testing phases), they will return to said SSP and start sending bids again in the event their responses improved. 

Requests by bidder 

Shankman has not yet published the findings for what results this traffic shaping will yield but said that on average, he’s measuring similar results to what Downinghall has reported.

Is it only used in open marketplace inventory? 

No. According to Shankman, “being thoughtful about when your ad requests go out is a very broad statement … and I do think it can really apply to anything that’s done programmatically.” For example, publishers can say they only want to send Safari requests to private programmatic marketplaces. 

Why should publishers do traffic shaping?

According to the executives at publishers and ad tech firms interviewed for this story, traffic shaping can help publishers to increase CPMs and lower carbon emissions, among other benefits.

Revenue optimization 

Sustainability 

Win favor with SSPs

Improved user experience 

Because traffic shaping is arguably demand path optimization, it not only decreases the amount of computational power that is used and thus reduces carbon emissions within a publisher’s scope three output. But it also reduces the amount of work that SSPs need to do, in theory, which bodes well for publishers in that relationships dynamic.

What’s more, Downinghall said that fewer ads running on a site improves UX. “Our product team loves the idea of more efficient ad requests, because as the user goes deeper in the session, if we’re turning off bidders, the load on the page is lessened.” 

Will this improve revenue immediately? 

Ultimately, Downinghall, Shankman and Wohl believe that traffic shaping on the part of publishers will have a positive impact on programmatic advertising revenues, but all cautioned that this really isn’t a method for short-term revenue gains. Rather, it’s a way to initiate longer term efficiencies within the programmatic bid stream that should lead publishers to a higher win rate and higher CPMs.

“I never thought of implementing these things as [a way] to increase CPMs immediately or in the test cell. I always focused on just breaking even,” said Downinghall, adding that over time, improving the efficiency of what bids are sent to SSPs and then downstream to DSPs, will “increase the profitability of a publisher’s profile” to those parties. As long as it hasn’t had a negative impact on revenue – which Downinghall claims has not been the case – he considers these tests to have been a success. 

Wohl on the other hand said that his brands have experienced a short-term gross revenue hit of “a few percentage points” in the months of April and May when the initial traffic shaping tests were first underway. But as soon as September, he said he expects these efforts to “pay dividends to us” to make traffic shaping well worth it from a revenue gain perspective.

“If we continue to prune in this direction and figure out what bid requests are not worth sending or not worth selling as a publisher, we can incrementally charge more for the ones that are worth doing,” said Wohl. “There is inherently a margin that publishers give up if we’re selling a really good opportunity, at the same starting price, as what we should know is a pretty bad opportunity.

>>> Read full article>>>
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source : DigiDay – https://digiday.com/media/wtf-is-traffic-shaping/?utm_campaign=digidaydis&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=general-rss

Previous Post

Gunplay Loses Custody, Daughter’s Mother Vonshae Taylor-Morales Reacts To Ruling (Exclusive Details)

Next Post

‘Expectations have never been higher’: Advertisers and agencies are navigating closer ties amid tensions

Microplastics and invasive crayfish: emerging interactions and ecological implications from three coexisting species in a subalpine lake – Nature

Uncovering the Hidden Impact: How Microplastics and Invasive Crayfish Interact in a Subalpine Lake Ecosystem

September 30, 2025
Scientists Warn: Bottled Water May Pose Serious Long-Term Health Risks – SciTechDaily

Scientists Reveal Shocking Long-Term Health Risks of Bottled Water

September 30, 2025
You Can Trigger ‘Time Expansion’—Meaning You Can Stretch Seconds and Warp Reality, Scientists Say – Popular Mechanics

Unlock the Secret to Stretching Seconds and Bending Reality: Scientists Reveal How to Trigger ‘Time Expansion

September 30, 2025
Roiserv Lifestyle Services Announces Key Corporate Changes at Upcoming EGM – TipRanks

Roiserv Lifestyle Services Announces Exciting Corporate Overhaul Ahead of Key EGM

September 30, 2025
Saving Energy and Money with Smart Technology – Terms of Service with Clare Duffy – Podcast on CNN Podcasts – CNN

Saving Energy and Money with Smart Technology – Terms of Service with Clare Duffy – Podcast on CNN Podcasts – CNN

September 30, 2025
Tim and Anita Schoen Endow Sport Psychology Program Director Position – Notre Dame Athletics

Tim and Anita Schoen Endow Sport Psychology Program Director Position – Notre Dame Athletics

September 30, 2025
Dodgers feel an urgency to deliver another World Series title to L.A. – Los Angeles Times

Dodgers Fueled by Determination to Bring Another World Series Title to L.A

September 30, 2025
City of Malibu Eases Event and Sign Permitting Requirements to Support Post-Fire Economic Recovery – City of Malibu

Malibu Simplifies Event and Sign Permitting to Boost Post-Fire Economic Recovery

September 30, 2025
The Police Made Chart History With This 1979 Hit Nearly 50 Years Ago – Yahoo

How The Police Changed Music Forever with Their Iconic 1979 Hit Nearly 50 Years Ago

September 30, 2025
WISD weighs in on Michigan Board of Education’s proposed health education changes – WEMU

WISD Takes Action on Proposed Changes to Michigan’s Health Education Standards

September 30, 2025

Categories

Archives

September 2025
M T W T F S S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930  
« Aug    
Earth-News.info

The Earth News is an independent English-language daily published Website from all around the World News

Browse by Category

  • Business (20,132)
  • Ecology (844)
  • Economy (865)
  • Entertainment (21,739)
  • General (17,331)
  • Health (9,908)
  • Lifestyle (878)
  • News (22,149)
  • People (867)
  • Politics (875)
  • Science (16,075)
  • Sports (21,365)
  • Technology (15,848)
  • World (847)

Recent News

Microplastics and invasive crayfish: emerging interactions and ecological implications from three coexisting species in a subalpine lake – Nature

Uncovering the Hidden Impact: How Microplastics and Invasive Crayfish Interact in a Subalpine Lake Ecosystem

September 30, 2025
Scientists Warn: Bottled Water May Pose Serious Long-Term Health Risks – SciTechDaily

Scientists Reveal Shocking Long-Term Health Risks of Bottled Water

September 30, 2025
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact

© 2023 earth-news.info

No Result
View All Result

© 2023 earth-news.info

No Result
View All Result

© 2023 earth-news.info

Go to mobile version