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Case Study

VICE Media boosts revenue across 500+ websites with Exchange Bidding2

The Goals

  • Maximize ad revenue at scale across a global publisher network
  • Maintain a premium user experience

The Approach

  • Implement Exchange Bidding, a feature within DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP)

The Results

  • Exchange bidding is the number two revenue source after DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX)
  • 17% increase in AdX revenue
  • 41% higher CPMs for Exchange Bidding inventory compared to non-Exchange Bidding inventory

VICE Media’s core business is content. Whether they’re reporting on news, politics, relationships, or entertainment, they pride themselves on capturing their audience’s hearts and minds with original journalism that offers a unique perspective.

In addition to their flagship VICE.com website, the company manages ad monetization for the VICE Digital Network: 500+ websites with a combined reach of 200 million monthly unique visitors. A large publisher network comes with both opportunities and challenges. Small positive changes in monetization can greatly increase VICE’s bottom line, however rolling out changes across a large network of diverse websites can be difficult to scale.

Optimizing for innovation at scale

A longtime DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) partner, VICE’s programmatic team first learned about Exchange Bidding when it launched in open beta.

Alex Payne, Vice President of Ad Platforms at VICE Media, described the testing and implementation process as “straightforward and streamlined."

Exchange Bidding allowed us to vastly expand the volume of inventory that we could monetize programmatically. It was much easier than onboarding partners individually within AdX or adding code to the page for header bidding.

Alex Payne, Vice President of Ad Platforms, VICE Media