By Allison Schiff – Article taken from AdExchanger.com
- Integral Ad Science, DoubleVerify and Moat, are banding together in an uneasy alliance to tackle in-app viewability using open-source software
- IAB Tech Lab took over responsibility for managing open-source code originally developed by Integral Ad Science that lets publishers work with multiple viewability vendors without having to integrate multiple viewability SDKs
- IAS claims third parties are measuring as little as 5% to 10% of in-app inventory
- The “fragmented ecosystem of viewability providers” limits access to demand, because advertisers generally prefer working with certain viewability vendors
- Open-sourcing the code helps solve the fragmentation issue, and turning governance over to an independent industry group legitimizes the effort
- The open-source code is a mechanism that passes the raw signals that 3rd party verification partners can use to build their own solution on top of and understand how much of an ad was viewed and for how long
- The need is more than just in-app viewability measurement, including the ability to measure invalid traffic, to handle tricky issues, like viewability for server-side ad insertion and pre-cached content, and to support transactions through custom metrics, like attention and time spent
- A component library will be open-sourced, and that will bring some consistency
- Display only Desktop-centric and mobile web-centric methods like JavaScript tags, page geometry (measuring the position of an ad relative to where it appears in the viewport) and browser optimization (monitoring internal browser settings to see if an ad is being rendered) don’t apply to in-app environments
- In-app viewability solutions are generally piggybacked on top of MRAID, the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s standard for rendering and serving mobile rich media
- MRAID 3.0, released in November, has limitations, including in its ability to accurately measure pixels, geometric positions and ad size
- Integrating a software development kit directly into an app offers more accurate measurement of in-app viewability, and allows for the measurement of native video and the IAB’s digital ad-serving template, VAST
- The goal with the open-source viewability initiative is to begin to move toward greater compatibility in measurement across publishers
- Already signed on in support the initiative, includes Google, Ansible, Conversant, Lenovo, MoPub, OpenX, The Trade Desk and the Media Rating Council
- But anyone will be able to propose modifications to the code, just like in any open-source code initiative, and an independent committee of industry stakeholders managed by the IAB Tech Lab will oversee the process