Welcome to our Tweet of the Week, where we spotlight insightful, thought-provoking, and sometimes even weird tweets from the world of adtech. Every week, we’ll highlight the best tweet from the previous week—one that captures important trends, shares valuable data, or offers unique perspectives on the market.
This week’s Tweet of the Week goes to Doug Lauretano, CEO of CivicScience Advertising. Doug’s tweet was in response to the bid duplication story we wrote last week, which surfaced interesting perspective from Jud Spencer, a software developer at DSP The Trade Desk. In the story, we cover how Jud estimates that bid duplication—when multiple bids for the same ad impression appear in the programmatic bidstream—“is probably a $5-20b+” annual “tax on the Internet.”
While SSPs are often seen as the main contributors to bid duplication, Doug shifts the focus to DSPs. “What goes unsaid,” he tweets, “is that this problem is created by DSPs, who almost universally bias bid response rate to the highest QPS…”
He and Jud then engage in a pretty good discussion in the thread about the point Doug raises. Doug’s argument is that DSPs might reward a higher QPS (queries per second) with a higher response rate. (AdExchanger published a very good overview of this argument earlier this year, which you can read here.)
Quick recap: Bid duplication happens when an SSP sends multiple bid requests for the same ad impression. The result is a fairly convoluted ecosystem where the same impression is bid on multiple times, driving up costs and leading to waste, mainly for the buy-side. Long term, SSPs can also suffer, as bid duplication creates inefficiencies, which leads to advertisers to pursue more SPO. This has led to some SSPs being punished and cut from supply paths entirely.
Check out Doug’s tweet here, explore the story on bid duplication, and read the thread to join the conversation or learn more. Also, what’s your take on bid duplication? Is there an undertold narrative or issue here? Let us know on X at @adtechradar.
