A real-time online marketplace intended for selling and buying advertising space and impressions. Ad exchanges allow publishers to make their ad inventory available to other purchasers in a central location. This enables many advertisers and publishers to swap merchandise and ads by connecting to supply-side platforms (SSPs) and demand-side platforms (DSPs). Anyone can buy from an ad exchange, as long as the ad exchange allows it. Advertisers and agencies commonly utilize demand-side media or their bidding technology, but ad networks and other organizations also buy advertisements from exchanges.Ad exchanges are nothing more than a centralized database of ad impressions. In the hope that someone will purchase their ad impressions, publishers throw them into the mix.
Demand-side platforms, for example, let buyers pick and choose the prints they want to buy. These choices are frequently made in real-time, based on past user behavior, time of day, device kind, ad position, and more for the user an ad is shown to.Instead of negotiating with individual publishers, exchanges allow advertisers to buy ads across several different sites all at once. It’s a better approach to buy and sell advertising because it’s more effective and efficient.Google, Rubicon Project, OpenX, AppNexus, and Yahoo are major players in the ad exchange industry. Publishers can construct private exchanges through a variety of ad tech businesses.Ad exchanges are more transparent than networks since they allow purchasers to know exactly what price impressions are offered before buying them.
Because many ad networks now source their inventory from exchanges, some argue that DSPs more closely resemble advertising networks than exchanges.They allow access to the buyers and are liable for the impressions they let into their marketplaces. With so many ads being served by so many publishers every day, keeping track of whose selling and whose buying becomes nearly impossible. As a result, customers have no idea where their impressions will appear. Additionally, vendors have no idea who will end up purchasing their products.