Programmatic Live Events Explained

Monetizing live events programmatically is a complex but massive opportunity for advertisers and the platforms supporting them. Live events capture the cultural zeitgeist of the moment and continue to command huge audiences — which hasn't slowed down in the age of streaming.

Despite the alluring prospect of monetizing live events programmatically, the format presents unique challenges that publishers, advertisers, and the ad platforms that support them must solve together and optimize continually. In this article, I want to give you a peek into how programmatic live events succeed today.

The Live Opportunity

The NFL averaged 17.5 million viewers per game in 2024 across all networks, and the NBA inked an 11-year deal with multiple broadcasters worth a cool $76 billion last summer. These points are simple proof of the staggering number of viewers live sports still command, along with the tremendous sums broadcasters are willing to shell out for a piece of the pie.

Even previous naysayers like Netflix, who balked at the future value of streaming live sports, want in on the action. Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos previously said only two years ago things like: 

"We've not seen a profit path to renting big sports."

"We're not anti-sports, we're just pro-profit."

"[Netflix] can get twice as big without sports."

With the recent Paul vs Tyson fight, Netflix now has the "most streamed global sporting event ever" under its belt, along with two Christmas-time NFL games. Netflix has changed its tune on live sports in a big way and clearly sees the enduring value of live events as a key strategy moving forward.

Capturing and extracting the maximum value from live events will naturally lead any broadcaster to turn its gaze toward programmatic advertising. Programmatic can offer advertisers the same automation and capabilities they know and love while buying across other digital environments. 

In addition to delivering massive and engaged audiences condensed in a very short time frame, buying live events programmatically empowers advertisers to deliver customized user-level audience targeting, measurement, and frequency capping via the same DSP and tools they use to buy everything else on the open web. 

Volume and Concurrency

The first and most obvious challenge of monetizing live events programmatically is the sheer scale ad systems have to deal with. 

If everybody watches the same event simultaneously, everybody will hit a commercial break at the same time — meaning a publisher must initiate unique ad requests for every single user tuned into the stream. The number of users watching a stream or using an application simultaneously is called concurrency, and it's a metric that publishers and their partners must understand to calculate an almighty QPS value or queries per second.

QPS is a term used to describe the volume of incoming bid requests to a DSP. DSPs have specific QPS thresholds that they can handle. If an SSP hits a DSP with QPS levels it cannot handle the DSP could start dropping bid requests since they do not have enough server capacity to handle processing the requests. 

The term QPS applies outside the context of live events, but its importance heightens during live events because publisher SSPs could push DSPs up against their theoretical QPS limits. Exceeding these limits could jeopardize a publisher's monetization and even tip over DSP systems to the point of being unable to handle processing other publisher bid requests, depending on the sophistication of a DSP's infrastructure.

Publishers can also generate one or multiple requests for every user depending on the settings configured in their ad server and SSP. Publishers must stay cognizant of their settings and concurrency levels to arrive at an estimated QPS to share with their DSP partners so the DSP can get ready for the influx.

Compare this to other environment types like VOD (video on demand) or display. Everybody is streaming or browsing at their leisure — sure, there is still concurrency, but nowhere near what a publisher would experience during a live event where everybody watches the same thing simultaneously. 

It is in the best interest of any publisher expecting huge QPS spikes to communicate these upcoming spikes to DSPs to give the buy side time to prepare. There is industry chatter about ways to handle this better than a human telling another human to prepare server capacity. But it's still early, and more advanced standardized prewarming APIs are yet to be created. 

Pre-approvals

CTV publishers each have their own rules and specifications that creatives must follow. Additionally, server-side ad insertion (SSAI) systems must transcode creatives before ad delivery. Oftentimes, ad systems will pull out ad creatives straight from live bid responses and then block those creatives from serving again if they need transcoding, essentially "burning" the opportunity if that same campaign bids again. 

While this transcoding process could go relatively quickly, solving violations of creative specifications could require a back-and-forth between humans at the publisher and advertiser client. If a publisher is working indirectly with a client it could take even longer to solve creative issues.

A creative being not eligible to serve could, at best, cause an advertiser to miss out on an ad break during a live event and, at worst, miss out on the entire event and beyond. Additionally, bad creatives could cause a loss of revenue or user experience issues during a live event.

So, what's an aspiring live event publisher to do? Pre-ingest creatives.

Rather than extract a creative from a live bid request, DSPs can push creatives to SSPs ahead of time so publishers can review, approve, and transcode creatives to ensure they are good to go as soon as a live event begins. 

Pre-ingestion of creative gives all parties ample time to ensure a creative is locked and loaded for showtime. Without pre-ingestion, the only alternative is for a supply-side system to extract creatives from the live bid stream, risking revenue for the publisher and loss of access to high-value inventory for the buyer.

Additional Considerations

A publisher can make a few more considerations to ensure live-streaming success. 

First, they should talk with DSPs who want to participate to ensure each side understands what to expect. In addition to the QPS estimates, publishers should know if DSPs are looking for any specific signals or structures in bid requests.

For example, some DSPs may want to see the "Livestream" flag in ORTB since they may use it for monitoring or adjusting their infrastructure. Some DSPs may want to know which deals are eligible for live events so they can monitor those deal IDs on their side or remove certain restrictions or guardrails that would stop a massive spike in QPS in its tracks. 

If publishers allow additional SSPs to participate in live events, they should be wary of the extra hops it takes to go from primary SSP to secondary SSP to a DSP. This added latency could ultimately wreak havoc on programmatic health. Publishers should also consider the impact of potential bid duplication and battering the same DSP with QPS spikes from their primary and secondary SSP. 

Live event programmatic participants must also consider ad tech vendors beyond their primary systems. Just because SSPs and DSPs can handle traffic doesn’t mean you’re out of the woods, you have to remember other partners and technologies are involved. 

For example, advertisers often work with verification vendors that "wrap" VAST tags (create an additional layer to add on pixels or pick up other environment information via a call to their servers). Wrapping VAST tags causes additional latency since additional servers become a part of the programmatic process, so all parties must stay aware of any additional vendors in the live event mix whose wrappers or pixels could buckle under high concurrency.

I hope this article sheds some light on this exciting niche of programmatic advertising and gives you a newfound understanding of what it takes to monetize live events programmatically.

Photo by Norbert Braun on Unsplash