Every year brings recycled predictions. I want to be specific about what has actually changed in 2025, based on what I see daily from inside InMobi exchange team.
Server-Side Tipped
2025 is the year server-side header bidding became mainstream. Publisher adoption of Prebid Server accelerated as Core Web Vitals penalties became impossible to ignore. Amazon TAM continues growing. At InMobi, server-side bid volume has grown significantly while client-side growth flattened. Exchanges investing early in server-side infrastructure are winning integrations.
CTV Hit Real Scale
CTV moved from promising to material. FAST channel proliferation, major broadcaster inventory entering programmatic, and DSP investment in CTV buying tools created genuine scale. At InMobi, CTV exchange volume has grown meaningfully. The Trade Desk CTV buying, Disney programmatic inventory, and Amazon Fire TV marketplace drive demand-side growth.
SPO Became Aggressive
Major DSPs — The Trade Desk and DV360 particularly — significantly reduced SSP count. Criteria: signal quality, auction transparency, latency, unique supply. At InMobi, SPO has been a tailwind — our mobile and CTV supply is differentiated, auction transparency meets requirements, and signal enrichment adds value.
AI in Production
AI stopped being a pitch deck buzzword. Dynamic floor optimization using ML is standard at major exchanges. DSP bidding algorithms are significantly more sophisticated. AI-driven creative optimization has moved from experimental to deployed at scale by The Trade Desk and Criteo. At InMobi, we have deployed ML-based floors, demand routing intelligence, and traffic quality prediction in production.
Privacy Transition Continues
Google Privacy Sandbox APIs being tested but adoption limited. UID 2.0 gained traction but is far from universal. First-party data strategies becoming more sophisticated. The cookieless future is arriving gradually and unevenly — not as cliff but slope. For the rest of 2025: invest in server-side, build CTV strategy, prepare first-party data infrastructure. That is what I am doing at InMobi.
Building Toward the Future
At InMobi, where I lead Web and CTV Exchange product strategy, every aspect of this topic connects to our exchange product roadmap. The decisions we make about auction design, signal enrichment, demand routing, and yield optimization are all informed by deep understanding of these fundamentals. Having built monetization systems scaling to $200M+ at Glance, I know that getting the basics right compounds into massive revenue impact at scale.
The programmatic industry is evolving toward AI-native, server-side, cross-surface architecture. By 2030, exchanges will consolidate, AI agents will participate in auctions, attention-based signals will supplement viewability, and CTV will be the dominant ad surface. The product builders who understand today's fundamentals deeply — and invest in building for tomorrow's requirements — will lead this transformation. That is exactly what I am doing at InMobi and at adsgupta.com, where I am building AI-powered advertising intelligence tools drawing on everything I have learned across Google, Automatad, Glance, and InMobi over the past decade.
If you are building in programmatic advertising, I encourage you to go beyond surface-level understanding. Read the OpenRTB specification. Study bid request logs. Analyze auction dynamics. Trace the supply chain from publisher to advertiser. This depth of understanding is what separates good ad products from great ones — and it is the perspective I bring to everything I build.