The Online Advertising Ecosystem Explained

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Online Advertising: simple or complex?

Global Rev Gen explains the Online Advertising Ecosystem in a picture perfect image.

The digital world is thought of as being crowded, complex and changing at an exponential rate. It’s not easy to stay up to date with the latest digital advertising trends which can be overwhelming at times. While the ecosystem may be complex, it by no means needs to be overly complicated!

Let’s break digital advertising down to the most basic level. Advertisers need to get their messages out in the public. To do this, they buy ad placements on websites. Supply vs demand in digital advertising is simple. Advertisers who want to spend their money is is called demand. Publishers have ad space that they want to sell. This is called supply. The entire digital advertising industry exists because of supply and demand. Basic economics!





The Display Lumascape

The Lumascape Digital Advertising
The LumaScape is a famous industry depiction of how complex, yet connected the digital advertising ecosystem really is.

Many companies and technologies fit in between publisher supply and advertiser demand. Some help advertisers through better targeting, dynamic creatives or analytics and measurement.  Others, like Supply Side Platforms (SSP’s) help publishers generate more revenue with multiple ad networks and others find creatives ways to implement new premium ad placements like rich media sliders.  Programmatic ad exchanges like AppNexus exist to become the marketplaces where supply and demand are exchanged.

The complexity of digital advertising comes from two main reasons:

  1. The Internet is a global marketplace with no geographic boarders. Example: An advertiser in Australia can target an Australian on an American website.
  2. Demand, Supply and Globalization dynamics exist across the entire ecosystem. Online and the web are not the same thing. Websites are only one of many places people can engage with digital content. The ecosystem includes all of the physical hardware, computers, tables, mobile devices, game consoles, internet TV’s, etc.

Source: Global Rev Gen

We hope this information simplifies your view of digital advertising!