Blog

OpenRTB news and analysis

What changed in the spec, what IAB Tech Lab is shipping, and what each development means for the people who maintain bid streams. Reference material lives in the docs; this is the timely layer on top. RSS feed.

CTV

CTV pod bidding grows up: duration floors, guaranteed deals, and live sports

The 2.6 pod bidding toolkit (podid, rqddurs, durfloors, mincpmpersec) was built for the live-sports CTV surge now underway. What sellers actually ship in 2026.

Spec release

OpenRTB 2.6-202505: what changed and what to do about it

A field-by-field look at the May 2025 OpenRTB update and the integration work it creates for exchanges and bidders, centered on the new data.cids field.

Signals

The User-Agent string is going away: sua, client hints, and what to send now

Chrome UA reduction froze device.ua years ago. How the structured device.sua object (UserAgent, BrandVersion) works, and why bidders should parse it first.

Privacy

DSA transparency in OpenRTB: where enforcement stands in 2026

The regs.ext.dsa and bid.ext.dsa extension two years into EU Digital Services Act enforcement: who requires it, what dsarequired values mean in practice.

Video

Three years of plcmt: the state of the placement migration

OpenRTB 2.6-202303 deprecated video.placement for plcmt in April 2023. Three years on, why dual-sending both fields is still the norm, not the exception.

Protocol

OpenRTB 3.0 and ads.cert in 2026: still waiting, still worth watching

Eight years after 3.0 went final, the layered protocol and its signed supply chain remain mostly unadopted. What would have to change, and what to do now.

Privacy

GPP keeps growing: new sections and what bid requests must carry

The Global Privacy Platform added four state sections for 2026. What regs.gpp and regs.gpp_sid must carry, and the mistakes that keep showing up in traffic.

Spec release

No more 2.7: how OpenRTB ships now, and why your parser should care

Since 2.6-202211, OpenRTB version numbers only move on breaking changes; everything else lands as dated snapshots. What that means for validation.

Spec release

OpenRTB 2.6-202501 in review: the January update, field by field

OpenRTB 2.6-202501 added content.gtax and content.genres for CTV genre signaling. What changed, who is affected, and how to check your fixtures against it.

IAB

What the IAB Tech Lab 2026 roadmap means for OpenRTB

IAB Tech Lab's 2026 roadmap is mostly agentic advertising. Its one OpenRTB post covers gtax, genres, and a Curation object excluded from OpenRTB itself.