Leading independent ad tech firm AppNexus has launched PriceCheck, a header bidding solution that enables mobile app developers to maximise their ad revenues through a transparent, multi-bid auction of their existing advertising inventory.

With mobile programmatic budgets continuing to grow, AppNexus is hoping to provide publishers with tools that can improve yield and offer low take rates. In contrast to closed platforms that practice high-latency mediation, the PriceCheck technology simultaneously allows hundreds of demand-side platforms and ad networks to bid on an impression.

As a result, app developers gain real-time transparency into the value of each ad impression and can control whether or not they accept bids.

“The most important step mobile publishers can take to improve the monetisation of their inventory is to know what its worth,” said Ryan Christensen, senior vice president and general manager for publishers at AppNexus. “PriceCheck, which provides impression-level price transparency, helps publishers drive demand density and increase yield. Its the end of the black box for mobile advertising yield management.”

The PriceCheck tool will work with banner, video and interstitial ad units, and works as an alternative to the current mobile monetisation standard, the SDK. While SDKs send most impressions to ad networks without knowledge of how much an impression is worth to that network, PriceCheck promises to more efficiently allocate inventory to the advertiser willing to pay the most.

“AppNexus exists to build a better internet, and nothing satisfied that mission more than helping mobile developers to monetise their innovative products,” said Ariel Lidow, vice president of product management at AppNexus. “Now were extending the success weve seen with desktop header bidding so that mobile app developers who traditionally needed complex and costly waterfall solutions to monetise their inventory have a powerful new solution.”