Ranker, a publisher that creates data-driven, list-based content attracting 55 million unique visitors per month, has seen a 70% increase in video ad revenues over the past year, following its implementation of AppNexus’s Prebid Video header bidder solution and the AppNexus Marketplace. The companies have published a short case study on Ranker’s success.

I spoke to Prem Purayil, CTO of Ranker, who explained that the company had been using a traditional tag-based waterfall model. But this approach had led to having 50 demand partners and growing complexity. Ranker had previously and successfully implemented AppNexus’s header bidding solution for display, so it was already familiar. Prem said Ranker activated video header bidding in just a couple of days and needed minimal assistance. Importantly, Prem said moving to header bidding had no adverse impact on user experience.

Ranker has now integrated 7 demand partners, of which AppNexus Marketplace remains the largest. Prem said that the vast majority of units served are outstream in mobile, which is where Ranker gets 80% of its traffic. Ranker has recently started creating mobile-first content for Snap Discover called “Rankworthy.”

For AppNexus, Ranker’s experience is a validation of its decision to build on prebid.js for its Prebid Video header bidding solution. Eric Hoffert, AppNexus’s SVP, Video Technology emphasized that using prebid.js enables an open video ecosystem where publishers can use any video player, demand partner and have ad server independence (see my interview with Eric from earlier this year for more).

Eric explained that there are now 100-200 video publishers globally using Prebid Video, generating approximately 10 billion header bidding requests per month. There are 35-40 demand partners now available. Eric sees Prebid Video as critical to the company’s vision for programmatic.

As publishers everywhere are transitioning their business models to be based on online video, learning how to optimize yield - gaining the maximum monetization for every single view - is going to be an ever higher priority. As a result, video header bidding is going to get a lot of attention.