What is mediation

Mediation is a strategy used by publishers (website and app owners) to maximize their ad revenue. They do this by integrating multiple ad networks into their platforms. A mediation platform serves as a central hub to manage these ad networks. In modern digital advertisement industry, such solution is mostly provided by SSP/mobile SDKs. As there are huge amount of advertising network out there ,it’s costly to integrate with most of them. As a mobile app owner, it’s seems impossible to integrate even with a small group of them. In such case, mediation emerged. Traditionally, every ad network offer the budget only to the apps. To maximize the income, some app owners with great development resources implemented their own ad network to diversify their budget source or they integrate multiple SDKs and applies a set of logic layers in app to choose the best bid. However, such not only increases the maintenance cost but also downgrades the user experience which is the nightmare of app owners. Networks started to support mediation since the issue turned out in the market. It was firstly implemented as server side function to distribute traffic to multiple bidders. To avoid performance issue and improve the unit price by narrowing the auction group of bidders, which was known as header bidding. Header bidding was known as a special solution for the client on PC webs. Nowadays, it’s been evolving. We can call it mediation or in-app auction.