There are many players in the programmatic advertising ecosystem and getting a full grasp of the differences between each of them is not an easy task. We are here to clear things up for you once and for all, untangling one of the biggest questions you might come across: Ad Network vs Ad Exchange. What’s the difference between them?
Ad Networks and Ad Exchangers are two different platforms that don’t operate the same. They serve different purposes in the process of selling your ad inventory and getting the most ad revenue possible for your pockets.
To understand the difference between Ad Network and ad Exchange, let’s review both of the actors of the programmatic ecosystem who play a role on this ad monetization show. Let’s dive right in!
What’s an Ad Network?
An Ad Network is a company that aggregates inventory from a bunch of publishers facilitating the whole process of selling it. Ad Networks take the available ad inventory from various publishers, curates it, and then sells it to the advertisers either directly or at a fixed price through Ad Exchanges where a real time bidding (RTB) auction takes place.
Ad Networks make the whole purchasing process more efficient for advertisers, since they don’t have to negotiate for the ad space individually with each website and the ad inventory they compile is already segmented by categories.
A very well-known example of an Ad Network is AdSense, an intermediary that takes ad inventory from lots of publishers and sells it to advertisers.
What’s an Ad Exchange?
The Ad Exchange is the tech platform where Publishers, Ad Networks or SSPs sell ad inventory to DSPs (Demand-Side Platforms) or advertisers through a Real-Time-Bidding (RTB) auction. Ad Exchanges manage the process itself of matching the advertisers’ demands with the publisher’s ad space.
Publishers and Advertisers can trade directly through Ad Exchanges, which makes the entire process very transparent since advertiser can see the available ad inventory before choosing where to put their money.
What’s the difference between Ad Network and Ad Exchange?
The difference is that an Ad Network is the company that serves as an intermediary between the publisher and the advertisers either through a real-time auction or at a fixed price, while the Ad Exchange is the platform where the publishers, SSPs (the supply-side platforms) or Ad Networks take the ad inventory to be sold to the demand side aka the advertisers.
If you know your programmatic advertising theory, you might be thinking “wait a minute, then what´s makes an Ad Network different from an SSP, the Supply-Side Platform that also sells a publisher’s ad inventory?”. Some SSPs have integrated Ad Networks, for example Google with AdX (Ad Exchange) and AdSense (Ad Network), to maximize ad revenue.
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