Early Proprietary Pre-bidding Solutions Emerge

Several ad tech companies independently begin experimenting with and offering proprietary JavaScript-based solutions that allowed publishers to solicit bids from multiple demand partners *before* making the final ad call to their primary ad server. These were precursors to standardized header bidding.

Significance

These early, often clunky, implementations proved the concept that publishers could simultaneously poll multiple bidders, laying the groundwork for the more refined and standardized solutions that followed.