An ad exchange is a digital marketplace that enables advertisers and publishers to buy and sell advertising space, often through real-time auctions. They’re most often used to sell display, video and mobile ad inventory.
The major ad exchanges include:
- AppNexus Wiki
- AOL‘s Marketplace (ONE by AOL)
- Spotx Developer Center
- OpenX (company)
- Rubicon Project Exchange
- Smaato Video Library
What is an ad exchange?
An ad exchange is a marketplace that enables advertisers & publishers to buy and sell advertising space which is also called as inventory in real time via auctions. They’re most often used to sell display, video and mobile ad inventory.
Exchanges enable advertisers to easily buy ads across a range of sites at once, as opposed to negotiating buys directly with specific publishers.
Ad exchanges are supposedly more transparent than networks because they enable a buyers to see exactly what price impressions are being sold for.
Private exchanges are used by publishers to more carefully control who can buy their inventory, and at what price. Instead of throwing its ad impressions out into an “open” exchange and letting anyone buy them, a publisher might instead wish to offer them to a handful of its favorite advertiser clients, or an agency it has a close relationship with.
An Ad Exchange is just a facilitator, a smart technology platform that makes buying and selling ad inventory programmatic, and more efficient. More often than not, the method of selling ads across the exchange is through Real Time Bidding (RTB).
As a DSP accesses inventory available on the exchange, the SSP provides the inventory available on the exchange.
