Entering advertising world may cause some difficulty as there are thousands of notions and relations one should understand. Before going anywhere, each newcomer should define who he is in the game: an ad publisher or advertiser.
Chicken-and-egg problem
The idea of appearing these key figures is about the following: companies of various sizes (Advertisers) needed a way or place to promote their goods and services. On the analogy of newspapers and magazines it was decided to use inventory of online places. The variety of Publishers is also huge: they can be small shops, bloggers, big companies and so on.
It is curious that sometimes one entity can take two positions. For example, you are an owner of a pet shop with a website. You can promote your shop on some other playgrounds and, at the same time, you can use your free space to earn some money (or maybe compensate expenses on your ad campaign) by advertising related partners like animal clinics, dog handler services, pet hostels and so on.
Where we can meet Advertisers and Publishers?
Direct contacts
As in the example above, you can write to your related colleagues and offer advertising services. It can be mutual advertising or just for one person. You will have to spend some time in searching necessary options, information gathering (traffic of your website, area you work in, financial expectations and so on) and negotiations. Main benefit here is that, as a Publisher, you will have all the income in your pocket; Advertisers, in their turn, will spend less money. Disadvantage of this method is that you will have not so much outcome from this channel.
However, there is one more option.
Advertising networks
This place is like a common playground both parties meet. They sign up and take desirable roles. All the mess is further performed by the system itself. It is like “plug-and-play” solution. You pay some commission fee for the services provided and get almost unlimited access to Publishers or Advertisers all over the world. Try best ad networks for advertisers Polus.media
*Your income here will be a bit less in comparison with previous method. But, nobody prohibits you combine them both.
Affiliate networks
Publishers and advertisers there perform the same role, however, there are some details. The brands with their goods are gathered in one storage, a network, where Publishers can come and choose whose goods they are ready to promote. In comparison with traditional advertising networks, Advertisers pay when the ad was clicked and, what is important here, a visitor that was redirected to a particular website has made a desirable action – a purchase, in often cases.
Certainly, there are other places where this figures can be met, like programmatic ecosystem. The procedure there is a bit different from the ones we have described, but role division is still the same.
Can we skip any of these figures?
The question itself is like: what is more important – left or right hand? The situation can be different after some time, but now both the participants are important part of advertising ecosystem.
If we cross out Advertisers – there will be no need Publishers in terms of current situation, they will have nobody to offer their inventory. However, who knows, probably it would be filled by something different?
Excluding Publisher from the scheme: the Advertisers will remain with their desire to promote products. We suppose, that some kind of alternative publishing could be invented.
There is no bad or good in this or that role as they are simply different, have different goals, different tools for it achieving and so on.
So, who are you in the game?