Ad Tech company

I'm sure many of you are familiar with or at least heard of affiliate marketing, pay per click advertising, and selling ad space, as ways to promote or post online advertising.  Have you ever wondered how exactly that works?  In class, we talked a little bit about the bidding process when it comes to key words in search engine marketing.  Did you know that there is also a bidding war for ad spaces online and that there is a company solely dedicated to creating an exchange platform for that bidding process?

Several years ago, I had a client that was looking to go public and needed our help with the process.  When my team and I first got there, we had no idea what this company did nor did we even know that such company existed.  It took us an entire half a day meeting to get a better understanding the whats and the hows of this company's business model.  To this day, I still don't fully understand how it actually happens but here's what it essentially does:

So basically a publisher of the ad space uses this company's products to set up a platform to sell their space and the company auctions this space off to the advertisers and the bidding war begins.  The most fascinating thing about this process was that thousands, if not millions, of bids occur in a manner of seconds, or even milliseconds.  What I never fully understood, or refused to even try to understand, was how the communication occurs among these publishers and advertisers.  How do advertisers know that such auction is taking place and who does the actual bidding?  I can't imagine a person sitting in front of his or her computer and clicking through to win the bids.  I'm not sure if these advertisers are subscribed to this platform and machines do the communicating but regardless, I thought it was the coolest technology and something that never crossed my mind when I saw online advertising.  I'm always blown away by the people who thinks of these kinds of things.

To find out more about this company: https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-is-appnexus-we-explain-what-the-ad-tech-company-does-1480632208

https://www.appnexus.com/

By the way, this company never went public and instead was acquired by AT&T couple years later.