FAQ

Trading

What does a membership in the exchange cost?

We charge a one-time fee for a seat on the exchange.  Again, it's like buying a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.

On an ongoing basis we charge a small fee per transaction. It starts at 3 cents CPM and goes down on higher volumes. It's a flat fee, not a percentage, and it's about what most members pay for the ad serving alone.

Why do you charge a flat fee rather than a percentage of a transaction?

To remain neutral.  If we charged a percentage, it would be in our interest to see the deals get larger.  The publishers might like this, but the advertisers would not.  With a flat fee, the exchange doesn't care who wins.

Is an impression the same thing as a transaction?

No.  There are two transactions for every impression: a buy transaction and a sell transaction.  It's just like a stock trade in that someone bought something and someone sold something.  The stockbroker for each side made a commission.

Can a member markup his inventory, or set his own commission?

Yes. A member can charge his clients whatever he wishes.  He might buy inventory on the exchange for $1.00 CPM but charge his advertisers $1.25.  That's his business.

Is the AdECN exchange more for brand or performance advertising?

Both.  The performance advantages are obvious: the extreme targeting, the arbitrage tools, and so on.

But brand works well because much of the inventory is disclosed, there are such tight controls on what shows where, and you can have the system automatically shop for value, increasing the number of impressions for a given budget.

Can inventory be both blind and disclosed?

Yes.  It is up to the member (or perhaps his publisher) to decide whether to disclose the identity of the site or not.  For example, some publishers maintain a direct sales force to sell their "premium" inventory, and don't want the rest of the world to know you can buy it cheaper elsewhere — so everything sub-premium goes out blind.  A member can make the same decision — sell what he can based on the site's reputation, and put the rest into the exchange blind.

On the other hand, some members realize that they can earn higher eCPMs by disclosing the site.  It's up to them.

Isn't the exchange just remnant inventory — stuff people can't sell elsewhere?

No more than the stock market is filled with remnant shares of stock.

Most members do try to fill their deals with their in-house clients first, but good in-house inventory can f-cap out on the in-house campaigns, and it needs to go somewhere.

The AdECN targeting also changes the nature of the inventory.  One member may put 100 million impressions into the exchange that, to him, are simply low-priced run-of-network impressions. 

But the AdECN targeting dramatically increases the value of those impressions by adding the viewers' age, gender, income, search histories, or the contextual details of the page. 

This is important: with good targeting and an auction for every impressions, there really isn't any such thing as remnant inventory.

How does this integrate with our ad server, or does it replace it?

A member gets the three interfaces — management, advertiser, and publisher — and the exchange provides the ad serving per se.  So, some members choose to replace their current ad server system entirely.

Others use our interfaces, but do the actual serving of ads through another ad server.

Other members place a lot of value on features in their current system other than the ad serving itself.  They like the workflow management or the CRM or the accounting.  For them we provide an API that lets their current system trigger buys and sells and reports in the exchange.

Most new members run their current system in parallel with AdECN for a while, then decide whether to replace or integrate.

Do my clients have to know that I'm running on the exchange?

No.  It's up to you to disclose your membership on the exchange or not. 

Ultimately, however, a publisher is going to want to know that you can liquidate his inventory, and an advertiser is going to want to know that you can get him reach.  They don't care how you do it.