Earlier this month, PubMatic shelved its Prebid integration wrapper, known as OpenWrap Web, and announced it would begin recommending Playwire as an offloading-onboarding partner for the 250-odd publishers that use its wrapper.
The news made nary a ripple, and relatively little revenue hangs in the balance. But PubMatic’s decision to hand off its Prebid wrapper to an outside vendor – ostensibly (and previously) a competitor – is an interesting incremental news story for the programmatic industry.
For one thing, it is a reminder of the programmatic pace of change.
Helping publishers outsource their header bidding integrations “was very ripe five, six, seven years ago,” John Martin, PubMatic’s VP of publisher growth solutions, told AdExchanger. Nowadays, there’s little need for PubMatic to own the publisher wrapper tech, when there’s a variety of third-party specialists for the exact service.
And the quiet wrapper hand-off also points to the potentially dwindling growth opportunity of the open web.
Not that anyone is going to come and say so.
For example, Martin said PubMatic is not getting rid of a product called OpenWrap SDK, a corollary to OpenWrap Web, but for mobile app monetization. OpenWrap SDK has 750-1,000 app publishers to the Prebid wrapper’s 250 web publishers.
“It speaks to the kind of opportunity and growth that we see in the mobile app ecosystem,” he said.
Not that there’s no opportunity across the open web, he added, but publishers will be better served working with a specialist for the wrapper service, such as Playwire. And, for PubMatic, the SDK is far more strategic.
Playwire CEO Jayson Dubin told AdExchanger the decision “comes down to focus as a company.” PubMatic is a large organization with many revenue streams and media channels where they operate. Looking at it “from a revenue-to-opportunity” perspective, he said, it makes sense for PubMatic to pass off management of the Prebid web wrapper. Whereas publisher page monetization is Playwire’s “singular focus.”
PubMatic can access practically any web inventory regardless of the wrapper used by a publisher. The 250 publishers that used PubMatic’s OpenWrap integration didn’t favor PubMatic the SSP. They might be using the wrapper to integrate with other SSPs and not PubMatic. Whereas the SDK is a prerequisite for access to that mobile ad supply.
Many publishers have already migrated their Prebid wrappers once, twice, who knows how many times since the advent of header bidding, according to Martin.
The wrapper doesn’t provide exclusive data or supply, as the SDK does. The agentic solutions being built now don’t rely on the wrapper, Martin said. But the SDK is the bridge and toll booth for the mobile app ecosystem.
And that’s why PubMatic has no plans to sunset its OpenWrap SDK, he said. Without the SDK, PubMatic cannot see and thus cannot effectively monetize in-app ads.
“That’s our bread and butter,” he said.
