Artem Papilov

Memex

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Auction Mechanics: From Christie's to Google Ads

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

New Zealand, 1990. The government hires consulting firm NERA to design a radio spectrum auction. NERA recommends the Vickrey auction — a format whose theoretical foundations would earn a Nobel Prize six years later. Expected revenue: NZ$250 million. Actual revenue: NZ$36 million. One bidder offered NZ$100,000 and paid NZ$6. Another bid NZ$7 million and paid NZ$5,000.

One wrong choice of auction format cost the treasury NZ$214 million.

In 2019, Google changed the auction format for the $48 billion programmatic advertising market. In 2021, the FCC raised $81 billion in a C-band spectrum auction — a world record. The EU ETS has generated €258 billion from auctioning the right to pollute since 2013. In every case, it wasn’t the good that determined the price — the auction rules determined the price.

Prebid.js: How the Programmatic Monetization Standard Works

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Programmatic advertising is a $595B market (2024), projected to reach $779B by 2028. Roughly 90% of digital display is bought automatically. At the center of publisher-side infrastructure sits an open-source library used by over 10,000 companies: Prebid.js.

This analysis is for decision-makers: what Prebid does, how it works, why it became the standard, and which levers determine business results.

300+

bid adapters

~90%

display = programmatic

$203B

US programmatic 2026

10K+

companies using Prebid

The Problem: Waterfall Leaves Money on the Table

Publishers historically sold inventory through a waterfall — ad networks called sequentially by priority. The first one that accepted the price got the impression. Others never competed, even if they would have paid far more.

Penrose Diagrams

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Spacetime is infinite. Light can travel forever. A black hole crushes a point to zero. How do you draw all of this on a finite sheet?

Roger Penrose’s answer, developed in the early 1960s: conformal compactification. A mathematical transformation that squeezes infinity into finite points and lines while preserving the one thing that matters for the physics of causality — the structure of light cones.

This one idea gave physicists a tool so powerful that it now appears in virtually every major result in general relativity — from the singularity theorems to the holographic principle, from the classification of spacetimes to the proof that gravitational waves carry energy.

The Universe as a Hologram

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In 1997, Juan Maldacena — a 29-year-old Argentine physicist, one year out of his Princeton PhD and newly an associate professor at Harvard — published what would become the most cited paper in the history of high-energy physics. Over 28,000 citations to date, roughly two per day for nearly three decades. The second and third most cited papers in the field are both about the same discovery, and both cite his.

The Price of Loyalty

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Since 2020, subscription prices have outpaced inflation by 3–5×. The US Consumer Price Index rose roughly 22% over this period. Most major subscriptions rose 50–170%.

Disney+ leads the pack with a 172% increase ($6.99 → $18.99), followed by Apple TV+ at 160%, Netflix at 125%, and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate doubling to $29.99. Meanwhile, World of Warcraft has charged exactly $14.99/month since November 2004 — 21 years with zero change.

Colophon

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is a static site generated with Hugo, hosted on Cloudflare Pages, and served from the edge at papilov.org. Source code is public: github.com/a-pap/papilov.org. Total operating cost: roughly $10/year for the domain.

AI Disclosure

All research here is AI-assisted. Claude (by Anthropic) serves as the research instrument and co-author. I provide domain expertise, editorial direction, quality control, and the questions worth asking.

The frame: the human is the thinker, AI is the laboratory. Every piece is explicitly credited with its AI methodology. This is a deliberate choice — I believe transparency about AI use in research is an advantage, not a liability. The value is in the questions, the editorial judgment, and the domain expertise.

Work With Me

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Product strategy, monetization architecture, and adtech economics.

Background

Product management in programmatic advertising. I run web monetization at a large advertising network — SSP/DSP infrastructure processing billions of impressions per week across thousands of publisher integrations.

Core expertise: RTB auction mechanics, yield optimization, ad quality systems, publisher monetization at scale.

How I Work

Short engagements, specific deliverables. I solve a defined problem and leave a clear path forward.

Typical projects: monetization audits, pricing model analysis, SSP/auction architecture reviews, ad product strategy.