AI in Content and Ad Optimization

It’s a critical lever of efficiency and growth for publishers. In 2025, the application of AI will become even more sophisticated, enabling publishers to unlock new revenue streams and improve user experiences across platforms/devices.

Key Use Cases of AI for Publishers:

1. Content Personalization: AI analyzes user behavior to deliver hyper-personalized content, increasing engagement and dwell time which in turn increases user engagement on the website, thus uplifting all engagement metrics without getting penalized and staying compliant.  
2. Ad Targeting: Machine learning algorithms optimize ad placement and formats to maximize yield purely based on user behavior/interaction based on content relevancy.

Granular Audience Segmentation

As the digital landscape becomes increasingly privacy-centric, first-party data is emerging as the key element of successful audience targeting. In 2025, publishers will tend to focus on granular segmentation to better understand their audiences and deliver more tailored advertising solutions and AI in content will drive the results. Discover more on how our ID solutions work and impact your strategies. 

Monetizing Granular Segments

Highly targeted audiences command premium CPMs, particularly in Private Marketplace (PMP) and Programmatic Guaranteed deals. Advertisers value these segments for their potential to drive conversions, making granular audience segmentation a critical monetization tool and drive engagement. 

Freestar’s solutions, powered by advanced data analytics, help publishers unlock the full potential of their first-party data, ensuring maximum yield from targeted ad campaigns. Get in touch with our Audience development teams to understand the full scope. 

The Evolution of Video Inventory and Curated Deals

Video remains one of the most lucrative formats in 2024 and well into 2025 as well. 

• CTV and OTT Growth: Connected TV and over-the-top video platforms will open new revenue channels for publishers. This helps in getting targeted in advertising. 
• Interactive Video Ads: Engaging formats like shoppable ads and polls will enhance user engagement and ROI.

Publishers must diversify their video offerings to meet advertiser demand and optimize ad placements across platforms.

The Value of Strategic Partnerships

In a complex and fragmented ecosystem, the right partners can make or break a publisher’s monetization strategy. 

Why Freestar?

Freestar stands out as a trusted partner for publishers, offering tailored solutions to meet the unique needs of every client. Here’s how we can help:

1. Our advanced algorithms ensure optimal yield across all ad formats.
2. We empower publishers to monetize their audiences responsibly and effectively.
3. With a dedicated team of experts, we provide unparalleled support to ensure success. It’s like experts helping experts. 

As we look ahead to 2025, publishers are poised for both challenges and unprecedented opportunities. At Freestar, we’re committed to helping publishers navigate this ever-changing landscape. Whether through innovative products, actionable insights, or exceptional support, we’re here to empower your growth every step of the way.

What’s next?

Register now for the webinar to know more about all predictions from our experts.

The post Publisher Predictions for 2025: Part 2 first appeared on Freestar.

The Privacy-First Era: Building Trust and Compliance

2025 will solidify the shift toward a privacy-first digital ecosystem, driven by evolving regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and newer regional policies. As third-party cookies phase out, publishers must adopt strategies that prioritize user privacy while maintaining robust monetization capabilities. Central to this evolution is the implementation of Single Sign-On (SSO).

Why SSO Matters in 2025

SSO solutions offer publishers a powerful way to unify user identities across their platforms. By enabling users to access content with a single set of credentials, SSO not only improves the user experience but also provides publishers with the following advantages:

1. Enhanced Data Collection: SSO allows publishers to collect first-party data more effectively, as users are more likely to share accurate information when accessing personalized content across the website. 
2. Improved Compliance: SSO simplifies consent management, making it easier for publishers to adhere to privacy regulations. This is achieved by consolidating user preferences and permissions in one place and making it easier and transparent for users to know what information is being collected upon entry. 
3. Increased Engagement: Streamlined login processes encourage users to stay longer and explore more content, boosting overall engagement metrics.

Any publisher investing in a robust SSO solution will be better positioned to thrive in a post-cookie world.

Ad Stack Optimization: Header Bidding Revolution

In the advertising world, efficiency and yield optimization are essential. Header bidding has long been a game-changer for publishers, enabling them to maximize ad revenue by allowing multiple demand sources to bid simultaneously. Freestar stands as a pioneer with this header bidding wrapper technology, extending the open source Prebid.js framework. 

Learn more about Freestar’s 4-step approach to performance optimization for memory management. 

The Role of Header Bidding Wrappers

Header bidding wrappers have emerged as a crucial component of a modern ad stack. These tools provide publishers with greater control and transparency over their bidding processes. Key benefits of adopting a header bidding wrapper include:

• Customizability: Wrappers allow publishers to set rules for prioritizing specific demand partners, creating a tailored auction environment.
• Reduced Latency: Conducting a single auction for multiple slots reduces page load times, enhancing the user experience. This directly works with content strategies that will form the core which we will be discussing further in our part 2 in this series. 
• Analytics and Insights: Advanced wrappers offer real-time data on auction performance, empowering publishers to make data-driven decisions.

To learn more about all the predictions, join us on the webinar on December 4th, 2024.

The post Publisher Predictions for 2025: Part 1 first appeared on Freestar.

In the world of digital advertising, balancing revenue optimization and performance is a delicate task. Page load speed, efficient use of resources, and seamless user experiences are as crucial as maximizing ad revenue. Freestar has emerged as a leader with its innovative header bidder wrapper technology, built upon and extending the open-source Prebid.js framework. A key focus of Freestar’s technology is not just maximizing auction efficiency but also modularizing the code to optimize delivery and minimize memory leakage across browsers.

Dive deeper into Freestar’s approach in improving performance in dynamic ad environments which is centered around modularizing its proprietary wrapper and optimizing browser memory management.

Understanding Header Bidder Wrapper Technology

Freestar’s header bidder wrapper technology serves as an advanced intermediary between a publisher’s website and various demand sources, facilitating efficient asynchronous auctions. By selecting the highest bidder from multiple sources, Freestar ensures publishers receive optimal revenue for their ad inventory.

However, Freestar’s focus goes beyond revenue generation. It aims to equip publishers with a modularized, performance-optimized orchestration layer that minimizes the impact on page load speed and mitigates memory leaks. Freestar’s wrapper is engineered to deliver only the essential code specific to each publisher’s needs, making it lightweight and efficient.

What is Memory Management in Browsers?

Understanding memory management is key to appreciating Freestar’s optimization efforts. Modern web browsers like Chrome, Safari, and Firefox use heap memory to store data such as DOM (Document Object Model) elements, scripts, and styles. They rely on garbage collection (GC) to free up memory that is no longer needed by removing objects that are no longer referenced in the code. However, certain elements—particularly those that change frequently, such as ads—can cause memory leaks if they are not properly managed. Memory leaks occur when old objects, such as removed DOM elements, remain in memory even though they are no longer visible or used on the page.  Other common causes of memory leaks include closures, event listeners, timers and intervals, and dynamic content.

This becomes particularly important in ad environments where ad units frequently refresh. If these refreshes aren’t handled correctly, the old ad creatives and their associated DOM elements may remain in memory, causing orphaned DOM objects. Over time, this leads to increased memory consumption, leading to greater page load times and a negative user experience. 

The Impact of Ad Refresh Cycles on Memory Usage

A key component of modern ad strategies is the use of ad refresh cycles, which replace an ad creative with a new one after a set interval. While this boosts ad impressions and revenue potential, it also increases the risk of memory leakage.

Freestar’s technology takes this into account, offering an intelligent refresh system that ensures proper cleanup of DOM elements and event listeners tied to old ad creatives. This process reduces memory bloat and minimizes the risk of memory leaks during repeated ad refreshes.

Freestar’s Proprietary Header Bidder Wrapper Technology: Extending Prebid with Modularization

Freestar’s header bidder wrapper is built on top of the widely adopted Prebid.js framework, but it goes beyond Prebid’s capabilities to offer a proprietary, modularized solution tailored to each publisher, and to each experience. This approach ensures that the code delivered is highly optimized for each publisher’s specific use case and requirements.

1. Modularizing the Freestar Header Bidder Wrapper

Freestar’s proprietary technology is designed with modularization at its core. This means that, like Prebid, Freestar’s wrapper is broken down into individual components—each responsible for a specific function such as handling bids, managing analytics, or facilitating ad refreshes. However, Freestar goes a step further by allowing publishers to only load the modules they actually need. This results in a highly efficient, optimized payload that reduces the overall file size and execution time, improving performance significantly.

For instance, if a publisher is using only certain demand sources or ad formats, Freestar’s modularized wrapper ensures that the code for unrelated features—such as video ad units or demand partners that are unused is excluded from the build. 

So, what does this achieve?

This precision targeting ensures that only the necessary code is delivered to the browser, resulting in faster load times, better performance, and reduced memory usage.

2. Device-Specific and Geo-Specific Optimization

Freestar’s modular approach also enables device-specific optimization backed by data-driven insights into device performance and resource limitations. Different devices—whether desktop, mobile, or tablet—vary significantly in processing power, memory capacity, and network bandwidth. By delivering device-specific builds, Freestar can ensure that mobile users, who account for approximately 50-60% of global web traffic, receive a lighter version of the wrapper with fewer resource-intensive features.This reduces the number of resource-intensive features by up to 30% (as shown from our internal tests), improving page load times and minimizing the impact on device performance.

In addition, Freestar’s header bidding wrapper can be optimized for geographic regions. Depending on where a user is located, certain demand partners or ad formats might not be relevant. Freestar’s modular builds allow the wrapper to be customized  by region, ensuring that users only load what’s necessary for their locale, reducing unnecessary overhead.

3. Prebid as the Core, Freestar for Customization

While Prebid.js serves as the foundation for Freestar’s technology, Freestar’s proprietary wrapper extends Prebid’s capabilities by providing more advanced customization and performance optimizations. Although Prebid is inherently modular by design, Freestar adds substantial value by incorporating proprietary features that fine-tune the framework to publishers’ specific needs. Freestar’s wrapper focuses on reducing the memory footprint, streamlining ad refresh processes, and improving the efficiency of demand-side integrations.

Benefits of a custom modular build,

• Minimal Code Bloat: By including only the required modules, Freestar minimizes the amount of JavaScript delivered, speeding up page load times and reducing execution overhead.
• Optimized for Device and Region: Publishers receive custom versions of the wrapper based on the user’s device (desktop vs. mobile) and geographic location, ensuring maximum efficiency for each visitor.
• Lower Memory Usage: Fewer active modules mean fewer memory-intensive operations, helping to reduce the risk of memory leaks or unnecessary memory consumption.

Freestar ensures that Prebid’s core functionality is tightly integrated with our custom performance optimizations, allowing publishers to leverage Prebid’s open-source advantages while benefiting from Freestar’s enhanced features and control over the header bidding process. This combination leads to higher ad yield and a seamless, memory-efficient experience.

Freestar’s 4-step approach to Performance Optimizations for Memory Management

Freestar employs several key strategies to manage memory more effectively within its modularized header bidder wrapper:

1. Efficient DOM Element Removal: When an ad creative is replaced, Freestar ensures that old DOM elements are completely removed from both the DOM tree and memory. This prevents orphaned objects from lingering in memory, which would otherwise lead to gradual memory bloat.
2. Smart Garbage Collection Coordination: Freestar’s wrapper technology works in harmony with browsers’ garbage collectors, ensuring that outdated elements (such as old ad creatives and event listeners) are marked as unreachable and freed up as quickly as possible.
3. Optimized Ad Refresh Logic: Freestar’s wrapper includes intelligent refresh logic that handles ad replacement in a memory-efficient manner. It cleans up event listeners and de-references old ad units properly, allowing browsers to reclaim the memory without delays or leaks.
4. Cross-Browser Testing: Freestar regularly tests its wrapper across different browsers to ensure compatibility and identify any discrepancies in memory handling. This allows the team to optimize for different garbage collection cycles and prevent browser-specific memory leaks.

 Achieving the ideal balance with Freestar

Freestar’s proprietary header bidder wrapper, built on and extending Prebid.js, represents a state-of-the-art solution that combines performance optimization, modularization, and memory management. By delivering a custom, lightweight build tailored to each publisher’s specific needs, Freestar ensures efficient resource usage, fast page loads, and reduced memory consumption.

Freestar’s focus on preventing memory leaks, avoiding orphaned DOM elements, and minimizing code overhead sets a new benchmark in the ad tech space. This allows publishers to maximize ad revenue without sacrificing performance. By modularizing its header bidder wrapper, Freestar ensures that only the necessary components are deployed, resulting in an efficient and adaptable solution across devices and regions.

For publishers, this translates into a seamless balance between ad monetization and user experience. Whether you’re optimizing for desktop or mobile, Freestar’s technology can help reduce latency, streamline ad delivery, and enhance overall site performance – ultimately leading to higher ad yield, improved user engagement, and a more competitive edge in the market.

Contact us today to learn more on how we can help you unlock your full potential.

The post Optimizing Ad Tech with Freestar’s Modular Header Bidding Wrapper: Performance Enhancements, Memory Management, and Customization first appeared on Freestar.