An ad network represents web sites in advertisement selling, allowing the buyers of advertising to reach audience easily through run-of-network and run-of-category buys.
Advertising networks provide with ad campaigns coordination for media buyers across thousands of people efficiently. One of the issues for publishers is non exclusive representation and exclusive representation where in the former one publishers use advertising options which are secondary to fill out the space which is left unsold by the primary ad network. While the later one brings a higher percentage of revenue sharing but may result in lower percentage of ad inventory being sold.
Types of advertising networks
General networks: These type of networks achieve low pricing through buys in large quantities combined with ad targeting technology and campaign optimization.
- General networks will not allow advertisers to know in which sites their message sill be appearing.
- Most of the general networks offers transparency to sites which are a part of network.
Vertical networks: They specialize in taking on consumer click data for enhancing the value of the purchased inventory.
- Though these networks are capable enough in reaching consumers comparable to large vertical publishers, the quality of net work’s affiliate of the content is said to be anticipated as lower.
- This makes the the vertical networks to price up inventory at a certain discount compared tot hat of the stand alone publishers but rate an advertiser have paid for the same inventory but in case of general networks.
Advertising exchanges: These services forms an auction based market place for ad inventory.
- The focus of the ad exchanges is increasing the efficiency of display market by offering publisher ad inventory for real time sale which has some potential benefit for creating competition in the market for publisher ad inventory.
Demand side networks: These ad networks are developed in house by agencies thus allowing them to acquire and sell the inventory to clients.
- As the rate of ad drops down and other large networks take share of the profit in large amounts, ad agencies see their margins dropping to 10%.
- Taking more control over the buying process could reverse the entire trend hence for these demands to work they should span spot market inventory and guaranteed premium inventory.
In addition to the above mentioned ad networks , it can be segmented in to tier 1 and tier 2 where the former have large number of own publishers and advertisers with high quality traffic thus serving ads and traffic to tier 2 networks.
Thus the above data gives information regarding the various type of ad networks and their impact on advertising.