This post is part of the “Advertising Basics” series meant for readers who are not familiar with advertising yet but would like to understand the basic concepts.

Advertising is a huge industry that has evolved from very basic approaches (flyers, billboards, newspaper ads) to more complex and effective approach in a form of ad networks. This multi-part Medium series aims to explain ad networks in more detail.

What are ad networks anyway?

Let’s start at the beginning with a definition: an online advertising network (ad network) is a service that connects advertisers with publishers.

Advertiser is any company that wants to have an ad placed in order to advertise their products or services. Publisher is a website owner who wants to make some money by placing ads on the website.

Key function of ad network is aggregation of ad space supply from publishers and matching it with advertiser demand.

Traditional vs. online

Traditional media (billboards, newspapers, radio) also have their own ad networks (sort of), but they are far more limited in usability than online ad networks. Traditional ad networks have troubles targeting the right audience and measuring the ads effectiveness.

On the other hand online ad networks can do all of these and even more (like automated reports etc.). Advertisers can target specific audiences (e.g. “moms who have 2 children and live in Phoenix”) and see how many times the ads were seen or clicked. That’s why more and more companies choose to advertise exclusively on the web and ignore traditional channels like billboards.

The biggest players

The biggest players in the digital/online ad networks game are familiar names: Google, Facebook, AOL etc. These are more general (horizontal) ad networks, but there are many smaller ones which, despite their size, also make big returns.

Stay tuned for our next posts where we’ll present different types of online ad networks, how much revenue they make, what types of ads we know etc. and then start focusing on a very special topic: advertising in the crypto world.

Follow the Crypto Marketing publication, Part 2 of the series is coming soon!