What to do when there’s DFP Outage

DoubleClick For Publishers / Google Ad Manager Ad Optimization
Last updated: September 20, 2019 | by son_m2

This post was most recently updated on September 20th, 2019

So publishers across the globe were all hit as Google’s DFP ad server went down for like 1.5 hours in the morning of November 12. That means that for more than an hour, the web is like 90%-100% ad-free. Ads were not showing up around that time. It started at 9 am and lasted until 10:30 am. This is one of a kind as the world has never seen such a massive outage by Google globally. It was a relief their software team has identified and fixed the bug as soon as they could:

What to do when there's DFP Outage MonitizeMore

The impact

Based on Google’s third-quarter report, third-party ad network brought in $3.4 billion last quarter. So the revenue is like $1 million per hour. Therefore, lost earnings due to the outage were roughly $1.5 million. Publishers both big and small across the web were affected because of such massive scale of DFP’s temporary switch off.

What’s plan B? – a temporary solution

The best we can advise here at MonetizeMore is to put AdSense or AdX tags directly on the page if your ad server goes down. That’s the next best temporary plan B during an outage. It can help minimize lost revenue, at the same time continue running your site on normal performance – at the very least.

Related Read: The DFP Cheat Sheet Series

A note to our publishers

We would like to very well reassure you that MonetizeMore has confirmed that all ads are running now for our publishers. If you are encountering any issues, please contact us at support@monetizemore.com and we’ll be glad to help you. If you want to discuss alternative sources of income for your site, you can reach out to us here.


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