Request for Review: Sustainability Landscape & Portal - Supply Chain & Sustainability Taskforce

[GLStephen]

The following two docs are the recommendations from the Supply Chain & Sustainability taskforce related to the following:

• A "positioning" or "landscape" doc.
• A sustainability portal that covers docs related to establishing, monitoring and optimizing sustainability efforts related to Prebid

There has been a lot of effort on these and I greatly appreciate everyone who has contributed. The nature of these docs is focus on "Version 1" that establishes the placement and relationship of Prebid to these efforts, with the full understanding that the landscape is evolving.

Open Questions

• Where do these live?
• Your feedback
• Any process for moving forward that I should know about?
• There are some lists like "Vendors" that may need some fleshing out.

The Docs

Statement on Sustainability

Digital advertising plays a vital role in the modern economy, connecting businesses with audiences worldwide. However, this connection comes with an environmental cost - from the energy consumed by ad servers to the computational resources required for real-time bidding. As our industry continues to grow, so does our responsibility to address its environmental impact.

Sustainability in advertising technology isn't just about reducing carbon emissions - it's about creating more efficient systems that benefit both the environment and business operations. This involves examining everything from how we handle bid requests to how we optimize our server infrastructure. While the challenges are complex, they also present opportunities for innovation and collaboration across the digital advertising ecosystem.

In the absence of standardized sustainability metrics and protocols, conducting transactions through OpenRTB and similar programmatic systems presents significant challenges. The decentralized nature of programmatic advertising, where multiple parties interact through complex bid streams, makes it particularly difficult to track, measure, and optimize for environmental impact. Currently, there exists no industry standard definition of sustainability.

This lack of standards means each participant in the supply chain - from publishers to SSPs, DSPs, and advertisers - defines and measures sustainability differently. This fragmentation creates obstacles when attempting to make informed decisions about sustainable advertising practices. For instance, one platform might focus on reducing server calls, while another prioritizes energy-efficient data centers, making it challenging to compare and evaluate partners effectively.

The current OpenRTB specification, while robust for traditional trading parameters, lacks standardized fields or mechanisms for communicating sustainability-related information between parties. This absence of common sustainability signals means that even environmentally conscious organizations struggle to automate and scale their green advertising initiatives within existing programmatic frameworks.

As the digital advertising industry evolves toward more transparent and eco-friendly practices, we expect buying platforms to adopt various methodologies that will continue to evolve. In this context, Prebid.org is positioned to play an essential role in supporting the ecosystem's transition to more sustainable practices. Initially, our focus is on providing comprehensive documentation and guidance to help organizations navigate and implement emerging sustainability approaches.

This educational and supportive role will naturally evolve as industry standards take shape. When concrete sustainability standards emerge, Prebid.org will expand its involvement to include developing and maintaining specific technical implementations, adapting its open-source solutions to support standardized sustainability measures across the programmatic landscape.

To begin this journey, we're proud to introduce the Prebid.org Sustainability Portal. This resource serves as a crucial first step - a central hub where members of the advertising ecosystem can access information about configuration best practices, monitoring approaches, and optimization techniques. The portal is designed to help organizations start taking meaningful action today while preparing for the standardized sustainability frameworks of tomorrow.

The Sustainability Portal represents our commitment to supporting the ecosystem's environmental initiatives, providing practical guidance that organizations can implement now, while remaining flexible enough to adapt as industry standards develop and mature.

<<Link to Portal>>

Supply Chain & Sustainability Portal

Overview 1

Publishers 2

Prebid.js 2

Initial Prebid.js Setup 2

Monitoring 3

Configuration 4

Prebid Server 4

Identity Modules 5

Prebid Mobile 5

Tech Partners 5

Bidders 5

Analytics 6

Sustainability Focused Vendors 7

The digital advertising industry's environmental impact continues to grow alongside its expanding role in the global economy. To address this challenge, Prebid.org has established a Supply Chain & Sustainability Taskforce dedicated to partnering with organizations to measure and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the ad tech industry.

As the industry works toward defining sustainability standards, this taskforce serves as a central resource for documentation and best practices, helping organizations align their operations with broader sustainability goals. This initiative reflects Prebid's commitment to promoting environmental responsibility while maintaining the transparency and efficiency of the digital advertising supply chain.

This portal organizes existing Prebid documentation through the lens of sustainability, providing practical guidance for both Publishers and Tech Partners. The content is structured into two main sections, each further categorized by Prebid software components (such as Prebid.js and Prebid Server) and conceptual areas (including Analytics and Bidders). This organization allows stakeholders to easily access relevant information for their specific needs while working toward more sustainable advertising practices.

General housekeeping pays dividends for sustainability.

• Remove bidders with 0 bids
• Upgrade prebid more often
• Retain bidders and identity providers that are providing value, remove those that do not
• Good operational efficiency provides non-zero benefit to sustainability

Publishers {#publishers}

Prebid.js {#prebid.js}

Publishers seeking to improve sustainability and supply chain stance should focus on the following major areas:

1. Work with Demand Partners who have bidder behavior that aligns with your sustainability goals
2. Monitor behavior to ensure those goals are met and to also discover areas of optimization particularly related to Geo and Device participation
3. Configure prebid with the minimum bidders and setting which meet your sustainability goals

Initial Prebid.js Setup {#initial-prebid.js-setup}

1 Choose Bidders Meeting Your Requirements

When choosing bidders consider your internal requirements for HTTP2 support, adapter size, bid response time, response size, cookie loads and more.

The docs at https://docs.prebid.org/dev-docs/bidders.html contain information related to bidder feature support.

Questions to Ask your Bidder:

1. What is their average server response rate and latency - and do they filter out consistently slow/non-responsive bidders to reduce unnecessary server load and energy consumption?
2. Do they have any capability to measure and report the carbon footprint of individual bidders' activities (e.g. computational resources used per bid request)?
3. What optimization strategies do they employ with their bidders to reduce overall infrastructure demands, such as implementing intelligent throttling, bid caching, or selective bidder calls based on performance?

2 Reduce Build Size

Only build prebid with the bidders, modules and features that you intend to use.

The on-site builder is available at https://docs.prebid.org/download.html and instructions for building manually are in the Github repo https://github.com/prebid/Prebid.js/blob/master/README.md#Build. Building manually the JavaScript object name to be defined, but is otherwise the same.

Monitoring {#monitoring}

1 Monitor Bid Performance

Major areas to consider here are bid rates and participation which indicates whether the bid is meaningful. Fruitful areas to investigate first are geographic and currency support for the bidder. Consider delivering different script configurations based on Geo and Currency or using Header Bidding management providers which provide this service.

Analytics Info
https://docs.prebid.org/overview/analytics.html

How to Integrate
https://docs.prebid.org/dev-docs/integrate-with-the-prebid-analytics-api.html

2 Use Professor Prebid

Profess Prebid provides setup validation, performance analysis, debugging and education about the live page behavior. Professor Prebid provides a wealth of information including:

1. Adunits
2. Bids
3. Timeline
4. Config
5. User ID
6. User Sync
7. Version Information
8. More

Prebid Professor is a great diagnostic tool, but is limited to the current page you are viewing.

User Guide
https://docs.prebid.org/tools/professor-prebid.html

Docs
https://docs.prebid.org/tools/professor-prebid.html

Chrome Plugin: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/professor-prebid/kdnllijdimhbledmfdbljampcdphcbdc?pli=1

3 Use Other Debug Tools

Use the Prebid debugging module to see other available data including bidder debug and the ability to inject configuration, intercept bids and mock responses.

Debug Tools
https://docs.prebid.org/dev-docs/modules/debugging.html

Configuration {#configuration}

Configure an analytics provider that can track the related areas of interest from the building and monitoring section. Prebid configuration to adapt to Geo and Device can be difficult for publishers to deploy. Consider a managed service that provides automatic performance based reconfiguration of your Prebid configuration if this capability is not available in-house.

Managed Services
https://prebid.org/managed-services/

Other Options
Cookie syncing can impact page performance. Evaluate cookie sync config to ensure it meets your requirements.

Cookie Sync Documentation: https://docs.prebid.org/dev-docs/publisher-api-reference/setConfig.html#setConfig-Configure-User-Syncing

Prebid Server {#prebid-server}

If you are hosting a Prebid server or working with a host company we recommend that you enable or inquire about the following items:

1 Monitor Bidder Performance

This is a universal recommendation. Ensure that you are monitoring server to server performance distinctly from client side. Compare performance between them.

2 Disable Bidders by Datacenter

Prebid Server now has “Geographic Scope” support. Using this allows you to only send bid requests to bidders that indicate they will bid in that Geo. Depending on bidders and traffic patterns this adjustment can greatly reduce bid volumes which directly impact resource usage.

GeoScope Examples

Global: https://github.com/prebid/prebid-server/blob/master/static/bidder-info/adf.yaml
US & CAN: https://github.com/prebid/prebid-server/blob/master/static/bidder-info/imds.yaml

3 Optimize Usersync Behavior

Prebid Server

Configuration
https://docs.prebid.org/prebid-server/developers/add-new-bidder-go.html#user-sync-configuration

Usersync Testing
https://docs.prebid.org/prebid-server/developers/add-new-bidder-go.html#user-sync-testing

Prebid Professor

Prebid Professor Usersync Info
https://docs.prebid.org/tools/professor-prebid.html#user-sync-network-inspector

Identity Modules {#identity-modules}

EIDs are in an experimental phase, we test many but conclusions are often difficult to draw. Until we have more conclusive evidence on which EIDs help, we encourage Pubs to continue testing and iterating, which often means testing a dozen or more EIDs. You should monitor and reconfigure as value is proven or not with your properties.

Prebid Identity Overview
https://docs.prebid.org/identity/prebid-identity.html

Prebid Mobile {#prebid-mobile}

No recommendations at this time.

Tech Partners {#tech-partners}

Bidders {#bidders}

Best practices for Bidders include the following:

1 Use HTTP2/3

Optimizing connection reuse is beneficial. This limits client side and transport resource usage and is expected to generally improve performance.

2 Reduce Payloads

Determine if extraneous JavaScript execution or other payload is being delivered.

3 Enable Compression

Once the required payload is determined use compression to make the response smaller over the wire.

4 Reduce Your Adapter Size

Remove or consolidate duplicate code and consider using the base or reduced size bidder if your bidder endpoint is oRTB compatible. The Rix Bidder is a good example of using library and shared functions to reduce code size. https://github.com/prebid/Prebid.js/blob/master/modules/rixengineBidAdapter.js

5 Combine Requests

Whenever possible send as many bid requests in the same network request as possible. Prebid.js supports this by default with multiple impression support.

Analytics {#analytics}

Best practices for Analytics Adapters include the following:

1 Connection Reuse

Much like bidders, analytics adapters should reuse connections as much as possible. Enabling HTTP2/3 and bundling of events can be impactful. Analytics events can be “chatty” otherwise and add to resource consumption.

2 Reduce Sent Payloads

Send only the data that you need and can process.

3 Reduce Response Payloads

Do not send unnecessarily verbose responses. An empty 204 response is all that is usually necessary. If you have a need for more verbose responses then consider compression.

Questions you can ask your demand partner?

1. What measures are in place to minimize unnecessary bid requests and reduce server load/energy consumption in the bidding process?
2. Do you have any capability for or plans to implement carbon tracking and reporting for ad transactions?
3. What optimizations have you made to your bidding infrastructure to reduce computational overhead and energy usage while maintaining effectiveness?

Sustainability Focused Vendors {#sustainability-focused-vendors}

The following vendors focus on sustainability.

• Klever
• Scope3