How Internet platforms Advertisement works05.01.26

With that said, here’s a simplified overview of how ad tech works: Advertisers create accounts on a demand-side platform (DSP), where they specify what traits they’d like to target (“Please show our ads to eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old man-children in the five boroughs of New York who own Xboxes and have searched for gonorrhea-related information in the past three weeks”) and what they’ll pay to reach them.
Web publishers have accounts on a sell-side platform (SSP), where they specify what kinds of users are requesting pages from them (“I just got a click from a boomer in rural West Virginia who is signed up to a Medicare Advantage plan and recently searched for information on reverse mortgages”).
The SSP and DSP send all this information about what kinds of users are sought and what kinds of users’ attention is available to a “marketplace” that conducts eyeblink-fast auctions where advertisers bid to buy slots on pages that are currently being assembled.
That long delay after you reach a web page but before it shows up in your browser? That’s the “surveillance lag,” the delay while all those auctions are concluded. Web publishers design their pages so that nothing loads until the ads are ready;
Cory Doctorow

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/222376640-enshittification

Anonymous

How Internet platforms Advertisement works05.01.26

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