Ad exchanges are technology platforms that facilitate the bidded buying and selling of online media advertising inventory from multiple ad networks. The approach is technology-driven as opposed to the historical approach of negotiating price on media inventory. This represents a field beyond ad networks as defined by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), and by advertising trade publications Advertising Age, iMediaConnection and ClickZ.
The major ad exchanges include:
- AdECN, which is owned and was purchased by Microsoft in August, 2007 but may have recently been closed down;
- Right Media, which is owned and was purchased by Yahoo! in April 2007;
- ContextWeb's Exchange, the leading independent exchange;
- DoubleClick Ad Exchange, which is owned by DoubleClick, a Google subsidiary purchased in May 2007;
- QZedia;
- Ayha; and
- Zinc Exchange, an exchange selling guaranteed impression delivery on newspaper sites.
Second generation ad exchanges include OpenX and AppNexus.
Ad exchanges can be useful to both buyers (advertisers and agencies) and sellers (online publishers) because of the efficiencies they provide.
Famous quotes containing the word exchange:
“But come what sorrow can,
It cannot countervail the exchange of joy
That one short minute gives me in her sight.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)