Ad exchange

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 such as Advertising Age.

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;
• DoubleClick Ad Exchange, which is owned by DoubleClick, a Google subsidiary purchased in May 2007;

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.^{[citation needed]}

See also

• Online advertising
• Advertising network
• Real-time bidding