The GDPR Is Leading Some Publishers to Shut Off Open Exchanges

A couple of weeks ago we actually shut down our open marketplace activity altogether.

Not a lot. Programmatic is a small portion of our revenues, anyway. We have high direct sell rates and most of our programmatic revenues come from buyers that already have a direct relationship with us, so they usually prefer to set up private marketplace deals. Open marketplace was only between 10% to 20% of programmatic revenues.

We're taking the overly cautious approach because we don't make much revenue from the open marketplace. We have a GDPR team that made the decision in order to minimize our risk [of getting fined for noncompliance].

Yes, that's correct; we're taking a global approach to it. This is something that we've been working on since before GDPR was even announced. We want to make sure that we're keeping our users' best interests in mind.

I probably got a minimum of 15 emails from buyers saying, "What are we targeting? Is your behavior audience involved? Is this UK only? Do we have anything in Europe?"

We've actually had a few buyers reach out to us about GDPR compliance recently, noting that they have been buying us in the open marketplace over the past couple of weeks. Which would indicate that there's still an issue.

We’re starting to see programmatic guaranteed pick up a lot since GDPR went into effect and even before then in May. If you had asked me a few months ago what our programmatic guaranteed looked like, I would say it was quite minimal. And now, all of a sudden, I've seen it pick up drastically since GDPR took effect.