A technology platform that enables web publishers to manage their advertising space inventory, fill it with ads, and then get revenue. A supply-side platform is a software element used to sell automated advertising. Online publishers commonly utilize SSPs to sell displays, video, and mobile ads. Both digital media owners and publishers are helped by SSPs to sell digital ads in automatic auctions. Their goal is to efficiently increase the efficiency of advertising space on mobile apps and websites to maximize views and decrease waste of space. Basically, a supply-side platform is an equivalent of a DSP (Digital Signal Processors).
When marketers use DSPs to acquire ad impressions from bourses most cheaply and efficiently, publishers are meant to do the opposite: maximize prices for which their impressions are sold. Similar technology enables SSPs and DSPs to operate. SSPs would allow publishers to link their inventory simultaneously to numerous ad exchanges, DSPs, and networks. In turn, this permits a wide range of potential customers to buy space – and the greatest possible rates for publishers. When an SSP lends impressions on publicity exchanges, DSPs assess and acquire them on behalf of marketers depending on certain features such as where they are served and which particular users they do.
The objective is to allow auction publishers to optimize income from their inventory by offering impressions to as many potential buyers as possible in real-time. This makes SSPs sometimes known as yield-optimization platforms. Marketers increasingly do not want to hire costly human ad buyers to negotiate media prices with sales staff. They would like to employ technology to buy ads more efficiently. The problem for publishers is, however, that this programmatic sales risk reduces the value of their inventory. The SSPs were developed to allow the publishers to combine this and handle relationships with multiple networks and ad buyers more efficiently. In addition to opening stocks to a broad range of possible purchasers, SSPs offer publishers the power to set the ‘price floor,’ which determines the minimum prices their inventory can sell to certain purchasers or via certain channels.
Some publishers may prefer house advertisements to sell impressions for free, for example. In contrast, others may want to sell advertising to a new advertiser for less than an existing advertiser to promote them to their sites. SSPs can also be used to determine which advertisers may or may not buy inventory. Sellers selling SSP technology today include Google, OpenX, PubMatic, Rubicon Project, AppNexus, Right Media, AOL.