Ad exchange

Before exchanges, publishers sold leftover ad space through advertising networks. These networks aggregated inventory from many sites, but didn't offer real-time bidding. In the early 2000s, Brian O'Kelley created the first ad exchange at Right Media, known as the Right Media Exchange, which officially launched in 2005. Right Media's ad exchange built algorithms for predicting, budgeting, and pacing, which enabled real-time bidding (RTB). Yahoo acquired Right Media in 2007, for $680 million, then shuttered the programmatic advertising DSP in 2014. Around the same time, Jason Knapp and Fabrizio Blanco were also working on the concept of RTB at Strategic Data Corp. Knapp filed a patent on their RTB technology in 2006. In 2007, Google acquired DoubleClick and its ad exchange, AdX (now Google Ad Manager). Demand-side platforms were designed to help advertisers bid for digital ad space in real-time across multiple exchanges. Supply-side platforms allow publishers to manage inventory before adding it to exchanges. During the mid 2020s, DSPs increasingly shifted from programmatic advertising to agentic commerce. ==Ad exchanges==