Why did ad servers appear?

[Habib01]

Ad servers are referred to as "first-party" or "third-party" depending on who uses them:

Ad servers used by website owners (for example, idnes.cz, seznam.cz, denik.cz, etc.) are referred to as first-party ad servers.
Ad servers used by parties that are not publishers are referred to as third-party ad servers.

Publishers are referred to as the “first party” when serving ads because, as the owners of the digital services on which the ads are displayed, they are the closest party to the website users’ audience. Advertisers are referred to as the “third party” when serving ads because their ad server communicates with the publisher-owned websites, but they do not communicate directly with them.

First-party ad servers are primarily used to manage ad serving on websites you own, while third-party switzerland phone number data ad servers focus on serving ads on websites you don't own.



To understand how ad servers work, it’s important to know why they were created in the first place. As the popularity of the Internet began to grow in the mid-1990s and more and more business moved to it, traditional print publishers also began to engage online. This not only created a huge amount of content, but also the chance to capitalize on a huge opportunity – banner ads.

During the early years of online advertising, buying and selling ads between advertiser and publisher was a direct and manual process. A company would simply order a banner to appear on a website for 14 days, much like they would buy an ad in a magazine.

However, website owners soon realized that they needed a more efficient and easier way to manage the campaigns of different advertisers running on their sites. And for this reason, first-party ad servers (or publisher ad servers) were born.

After a few years, advertisers also realized that they needed a way to host their creatives (i.e., the actual ads) and measure the performance of their campaigns (e.g., by analyzing impressions, clicks, and conversions) across multiple publishers. The solution to these problems came in the form of a third-party ad server (aka advertiser ad server).