In the world of online entertainment, 9GAG has been a leading source of joy and laughter for more than 15 years, delivering viral content that spans videos, memes, and gifs to over 200 million global audiences.

With its unique blend of user-generated content, 9GAG has established itself as a go-to platform for millions seeking a good laugh. Yet, behind the scenes, managing such a vast array of content while optimizing ad revenue and user experience presents a formidable challenge. 

Andrew Wu, the Senior Manager of AdOps and Programmatic at 9GAG, found himself navigating complex ad monetization strategies and ad stack, which led the company to search for streamlined workflows and solutions to maximize revenue and reduce costs. 

The Challenge: The Need for More Precision in the Ad Stack

Due to the nature of 9GAG's global audience, and its ad stack team being based in Hong Kong, 9GAG was presented with a unique challenge. This geographical gap underscores the challenge of optimizing monetization strategies tailored to diverse regions, particularly in European and US markets - 9GAG's primary focus. 

Andrew shed more light on the fact that, initially, they relied on an SSP-created wrapper dominant in the APAC market. However, it proved inadequate for meeting 9GAG's global monetization targets. Integration of CMPs was sluggish, onboarding of new SSP partners took up to a month or two, and the bidstream lacked crucial data, hindering efficient monetization, in-depth analysis, and ad stack setup.

Amidst the new privacy policies, cookieless trends, and supply path optimization (SPO) demands, the need for better access to data for enhanced analysis, and monetization is crucial to provide a more efficient setup for their users. This quest for a more robust solution ultimately led 9GAG to explore the capabilities of Assertive Yield.

"What we had was a previous setup with Google, which is quite a normal setup. But then I felt this was not enough to tackle the issues we had. As the programmatic landscape is getting more and more complicated, we needed more sophisticated handling of our programmatic ads to monetize users more efficiently." Andrew Wu

The Solution: Sophisticated Revenue Management and Analytics

The transition to AY’s Yield Manager completely revolutionized 9GAG's optimization approach, enabling them to conduct various A/B tests across diverse user profiles effortlessly without latency, and lazy loading distances.  As long as the user is on their site, the Yield Manager tracks whether the SSP is bidding or not to enable the most efficient auction.

The team can now establish tailored auction setups, such as a European standard auction or one geared towards US users, empowering more efficient monetization of diverse users.

According to Andrew, compared to previous solutions, the Yield Manager offered unparalleled agility in onboarding new demand. While their previous wrappers often took months for CMPs setup, Assertive Yield enabled instant integration of CMPs, allowing for swift adjustment to changing market demands.

Leveraging Yield Intelligence’s extensive tracker, 9GAG monitors overall yield optimization and site performance metrics in detail. This includes analyzing Confirm Clicks Penalty, Browser Behaviors, Cumulative Layout Shift, User Browser Sizes, Google Cookie Deprecation report, and more than a trillion data points, providing vital data analytics for ad stack monetization.

 “It can also track the cookieless situation because they can understand whether the user has fallen into the bucket that Google is testing or not. Right now I can easily see the performance comparing cookies and cookieless users which is crucial for  our decision making” said Andrew Wu

9GAG’s decision to partner with us was reinforced by the usability of our exceptional dashboards. With the intuitive dashboard, monitoring daily performance and conducting multivariate tests become seamless tasks, empowering their ad stack team with data-driven optimizations, streamlined operations, reduced costs, and swift rollout of ad changes with confidence. 

“The AY dashboard is one of the best I've ever seen. I can easily set up tests and monitor everyday performance. We can more efficiently monetize. This benefits us as a small team, allowing us to focus more on strategy rather than getting bogged down in operational details." - Andrew Wu.

The Results: 9% uplift in RPM (Revenue per Session) and 48% bid request reduction with Yield Optimizer

The partnership with Assertive Yield has been nothing short of transformative for 9GAG, leading to a remarkable 9% session RPM (Revenue per Session) uplift with the much-more-in-one wrapper - Yield Manager

This performance boost was accompanied by a 48% reduction in bid requests through Yield Optimizer’s engine, indicating a more efficient allocation of resources and a streamlined approach to SSP partnerships.  

“We were using an SSP-created Prebid wrapper, which is most dominant in the APAC market, but after transitioning to the  Assertive Yield wrapper,  we observed an average uplift of 9% session RPM (Revenue per Session) We also saw a 48% reduced bid requests through their optimization engine” Andrew Wu highlighted

By tracking SSP bidding activity in real-time, 9GAG ensured the most efficient auction for each of its users. Their  SSP partners now have almost half of the requests while maintaining the same level (or increase) of revenue because of 9GAG’s ability to cut down low-performing requests.

It doesn’t end there, the transition to Assertive Yield’s wrapper, also upgraded how the 9GAG team works around ad monetization, especially with the extra data that is being collected through Yield Intelligence.

“Now I’m able to understand what was the consequence of adding one extra ad unit. ‘Would the session time of a user be longer or shorter? Will it affect the page loading speed or page loading time?’ Now I have an extensive understanding because these are the data that Assertive Yield tracks when I'm doing any sort of ad changes on the site” Andrew Wu

Conclusion

For 9GAG, Assertive Yield has not just been a tool but a game-changer, enabling the platform to navigate the complexities of ad monetization with confidence and efficiency. 

The results speak volumes, from significant RPM (Revenue per Session) uplifts to operational efficiencies that have allowed the team to focus on strategy rather than constant minor operational details.  Furthermore, despite the 9GAG’s ad stack team being based in Hong Kong, they still receive extensive 20/7 support from AY ensuring that they get the most out of our solutions.

Do you lead publishers' ad operations and need a sophisticated and robust platform to scale efficiently, like 9GAG? Learn more about how Assertive Yield can help your business achieve remarkable results. Request a demo today or try our Assertive Yield Suite for free!