Today, we're opening the beta of CloudX Orchestrator.
CloudX Orchestrator is our new multi-mediation offering. If you run CloudX alongside another mediation platform or platforms, Orchestrator lets you decide, ad unit by ad unit, how they work together: which one gets called first, or whether they run in parallel. You can change that decision in the CloudX dashboard at any time, without shipping an app update. When platforms run in parallel, the price comparison happens inside our TEE-backed Trusted Price Arbiter, giving you the ability to compare actual prices instead of aggregates. It has been designed to be non-disruptive to publishers' user acquisition campaigns and revenue attribution. Importantly, everything is instrumented with consistent telemetry, so your partner platforms get accurate and timely reporting regarding auction details and outcomes.
Total flexibility and demand path optimization
Choosing a monetization platform has always come down partly to merit and partly to friction.
On merit, not all demand comes through every platform in the same way. Each platform has demand that performs better through it than anywhere else, and some demand that is only available through it. Verticalized platforms in particular tend to be strongest for their own demand. As a publisher, if you want the best of each demand source and fewer tradeoffs, and you can get there without disruption to your business, including on the user acquisition side, then it behooves you to work with multiple platforms.
On friction, switching platforms has previously meant a new SDK, new adapters, QA, an app release, and weeks or months of waiting for users to upgrade, repeated for every app in the portfolio. Running two platforms in the same app has meant writing your own routing logic and keeping a team around to maintain it. For most publishers, testing a new platform or running more than one in the same app has been too cumbersome and too costly.
With Orchestrator, those blockers go away. Testing a new setup, or running several platforms in the same app, no longer requires engineering work, and the whole thing has been designed with continuity in mind. Once the platform choice is a setting rather than an engineering project, publishers can make it based on measured performance, and revisit their setups whenever they want.
How it works
- Integrate once. Add the CloudX SDK and a supported mediation platform (AppLovin MAX to start) to your app.
- Pick a strategy per ad unit. Choose an integration type from the common types listed in our guide to multi-bid architectures. CloudX tells the SDK which platforms to call and in what order.
- Change it from the dashboard. Switching strategies doesn't require an app release. Floors, targeting, and demand on the other platform stay in that platform's dashboard.
- See it all in one place. Each platform's attempts, loads, wins, and impressions show up in a single reporting view, so you can see what each one actually contributes. You can use A/B testing and our experimentation framework to make this simple and rigorous.
Why we built this
Earlier this year, we published a guide to the architectures publishers use to run more than one platform: first look, pre-bid, parallel, and post-bid. By May, publishers across verticals were running CloudX in first look and parallel setups and seeing material revenue lifts, and those results have held up since. Orchestrator was inspired by that work and goes a step further, giving publishers the ability to try different setups without code changes, and to run different setups across different inventory segments, without the operational and technical overhead of building and maintaining that capability themselves.
It also draws on the rest of this year's work. That includes our auction running inside a Trusted Execution Environment, leveling the playing field for non-SDK buyers, multi-round auctions, TEE 2.0, and last week's Dynamic Pricing. Each of these gives publishers more control inside CloudX. Orchestrator is our biggest step yet, because it extends that control past CloudX to the whole monetization stack. Tradeoffs that publishers used to live with go away. They can try different things, run multi-platform setups without code changes, and consider options that were never on the table before. For the first time, publishers can decide how every platform in their app works together, measure the result, and change it whenever they want, without touching code. We view this as a paradigm shift for publishers. Options that were previously inaccessible are now within reach, and much of what stood between publishers and the best setup for every selling opportunity is gone.
Full telemetry for buyers
Orchestrator is built for publishers, but it gives buyers a clearer picture too. Custom-built multi-mediation setups have no way to report consistent metrics to buyers in a timely fashion, and some don't attempt to at all. Buyers bid into these auctions with very little visibility into how the supply side is set up. They don't know up front whether the auction they're bidding in is the one that decides the impression, and they don't learn what happened after it. That makes it hard for buyers to operate with confidence, or to be effective at all.
To solve these problems, we're adding a signal to the bid request that identifies whether the auction we run is considered “final,” or whether another mediation platform could conceivably win outside of our auction. CloudX bidders also get loss notifications that reflect the final outcome, including when the impression goes to another mediation platform, so they know promptly when there's a higher bid elsewhere. We'll extend those notifications to partner platforms and their buyers as well.
Live today on Android
The beta is live today on Android, including Unity Android builds, with AppLovin MAX as the first supported mediation platform. Publishers can run standalone or post-bid strategies across interstitial, rewarded, app open, banner, MREC, and native formats. iOS and additional mediation platforms are next, as are other multi-platform architectures such as parallel loading, which we'll support where each platform's policies allow it. We've designed Orchestrator to be non-disruptive to publishers and to respect the broader ecosystem, and that will guide what we support as we expand.
If you're a mobile publisher running more than one platform, or you're ready to start, email hello@cloudx.io to join the beta. If you're a buyer working on in-app supply path optimization, we'd like to hear from you too.
