What is the Titan Program?

Working in tech and advertising means we’re on a frontier of fast-moving, constantly shifting regulations and programming. It’s a brave new world for both publishers and advertisers, but especially for ad networks (like us!) that bridge the gap between said publishers and advertisers.

We’re always looking to run better, faster, less clunky code on our partner sites, and to minimize the impact advertisements have on the user experience. But this shouldn’t come at the risk of RPMs or revenue for our partners. This is where the Titan Program comes in, a way of testing emerging technologies on selected sites, to benefit both our product team and the site owners.

So, what is a Titan?

The Titans are the partner sites that we’ve asked to join the program. When it comes to testing and looking for conclusive results, we need a wide range of very different websites to test on. So we’ve handpicked a range of our partner websites with different attributes. This is so we can observe how different program code runs on different websites. By having a large and varied pool of sites to test on, we catch anomalies or bugs quicker, and can predict how the program will behave on different sites before even implementing the tech to the rest of our partners.

What’s being tested?

It varies depending on what our product team is working on at the moment. It could be a new immersive ad unit that we need to test the performance and scale of before it goes out to our other partners. It may be updates to the ads.txt program, or changes to ensure our reporting software is more lightweight. We’re always looking for ways to ensure our tech is leaner, and therefore reducing the impact on load times or page speeds.

We only utilize A/B testing, as this minimizes the impact of new products and features since it only affects a percentage of the site’s total traffic, and gives us the control to switch it off if it’s having a negative impact. Ultimately, we’re looking for ways to improve the user experience, so we feel confident pushing new technology and updates to the rest of the Collective.

How do the Titans benefit from the program?

All of our Titan sites are informed of when expected testing will take place, and when new tech will be released to their sites. They can opt out of testing for any reason, at any time. During testing, they have a direct line to our product team to report any issues or discrepancies from their side, which means they work with us in finding bugs.

The best bit for them? They get to be the first to try tech that’s designed to make their sites lighter, faster, and better for their users. We take their feedback onboard during the testing process and work with them to build better tech for their sites, and the rest of the Collective.

We’ll be opening up applications to our partner sites soon for the opportunity to join our Titan Program, so keep an eye on your inbox! If you’re not a partner, you can apply to join the Collective here. As always, we’re updating our blog weekly with industry news, audience insights, and more.