Minute Media increases video revenue and efficiency using Exchange Bidding
Success Story

Minute Media increases video revenue and efficiency using Exchange Bidding

Minute Media is a global media company that powers content, advertising, and technology for publishers and brands internationally across a variety of content genres, including sports, esports, lifestyle content, and more. Minute Media+, their proprietary video advertising solution, is used by more than 500 publishers and brands worldwide to deliver video ads directly into instream video content everywhere viewers are watching.

As Minute Media’s business has grown, they’ve identified the need to implement a solution that can help them streamline their advertising processes to increase revenue and efficiency. This is why they decided to use Google Ad Manager’s Exchange Bidding feature to help them grow their instream video revenue, automate their billing process, and deliver a seamless ad experience to viewers.

Exchange Bidding is a server-to-server solution that lets publishers have multiple advertising exchanges compete for all their ads at the same time. In addition, Exchange Bidding helps partners grow revenue while simultaneously providing a holistic view of each ad partner’s performance and offering a more streamlined billing and payment process. It’s available for a variety of advertising formats on web and app including display, instream, outstream, and rewarded video.

Maximizing yield while preserving the viewer experience

Prior to using Exchange Bidding, Minute Media worked with their publishing partners using multiple tag-based solutions. This often required Minute Media to manually manage prices and priority in their programmatic waterfall to match their exchange partners’ fill rates and CPMs, which was cumbersome and time intensive.

Our prior process of using tags and manually adjusting pricing was unsustainable— we knew there was a better way to optimize our yield, which is why we turned to Google Ad Manager’s Exchange Bidding feature to monetize our instream video content

Sherzod Rizaev, Global Head of Commercial Operations, Minute Media

This process became even more complex as Minute Media’s number of customers and volume of video content grew, increasing the need to easily scale their ad serving to maximize yield while preserving the viewing experience.

Increasing revenue and efficiency with Exchange Bidding

Minute Media quickly made the move to Exchange Bidding for their instream video content, transitioning their tag-based partners to Exchange Bidding. They started by moving a few key partners at a time, and over the course of just a few months, transitioned six demand partners from tag-based solutions to Exchange Bidding.

“We’re advocating for other advertising exchanges to double-down on Exchange Bidding for video as their primary transactional channel, it has been a huge growth-driver for Minute Media. We see over 1B ad opportunities per month through our video platform alone, so when dealing with this type of scale, efficiency truly matters,” said Sherzod Rizaev, Global Head of Commercial Operations at Minute Media.

With the majority of their partners now using Exchange Bidding, Minute Media and their demand partners’ businesses are thriving.

Minute Media increases their programmatic instream video revenue by over 30% using Exchange Bidding

Exchange Bidding for instream video has driven real results for Minute Media—they were able to increase their programmatic video revenue by more than 34% in the first few months of implementing Exchange Bidding (publisher reported data, March - May 2019). They also improved day-to-day operational efficiencies, which has helped free up time to focus one growing their overall business.

“With Exchange Bidding we no longer need to manually manage each tag-based partner. Because of this, bids compete in real time and we’ve decreased advertising operations overheard, streamlined billing and collections, and improved the transparency and ease of troubleshooting due to a more centralized video platform,” said Sherzod Rizaev, Global Head of Commercial Operations.

As Minute Media’s business and video content continues to grow, they expect their usage of Exchange Bidding to continue to grow with it. Minute Media plans to use Exchange Bidding to power their business, and their advertising and publishing partners’ businesses, far into the future.

You can get started with Exchange Bidding for instream video today. Visit the Google Ad Manager website or the Exchange Bidding help center to learn more.

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