Digital Lexicon Hub

A digital marketplace where publishers and advertising buyers transact ad inventory, commonly through automated auctions.

Ad exchanges set the price and destination of much open-web display and video spend, so the exchanges a buyer or publisher uses shape the inventory quality, auction fees and transparency they get.

A publisher sends each page view to an exchange, which issues an OpenRTB bid request to connected DSPs within about 100 milliseconds; the highest eligible bid above the floor price wins and its creative is returned to the page.

An exchange is a transaction venue, not a guarantee of quality: resold or spoofed inventory, opaque fee layers and duplicate auctions for the same impression can raise costs. Ads.txt, sellers.json and supply-path review reduce but do not remove these risks.

Exchanges sit between supply-side platforms or publisher ad servers and buyers such as DSPs and ad networks. For each available impression they send a bid request containing context like placement, device and consented user signals, collect bids, apply floors and policy rules, run the auction and return the winning creative. Most use the IAB Tech Lab OpenRTB protocol and first-price auctions.