AdBrite Opens Up to Other Ad Networks

AdBrite has cut deals with numerous ad networks, allowing them to sell inventory into its auction-based marketplace for mostly small to mid-sized sites. A dozen networks including Advertising.com, Burst Media, AdPepper Media, PrecisionClick and CPX Interactive are now trafficking ads with AdBrite, the company said.

AdBrite has worked with ad networks as part of a pilot program since fall 2007, a year after it embraced greater transparency into its audience stats and inventory avails. It was then, fourteen months before Facebook introduced a nifty audience configuration tool for marketers as part of its Social Ads program, that AdBrite created its interface letting media buyers plug in audience characteristics and immediately generate a count of available inventory.

It’s all very exchange-like. Indeed, the new ad networks policy shows how tenuous is the distinction between ad networks and exchanges. An exchange is fundamentally an ad network that lets anyone — including other networks — trade inventory into an auction marketplace, finds the optimal pairing of advertiser and publisher, and charges fees rather than a percentage of sale. Like so many developments in the display ad arena these days, AdBrite’s move takes the display ad business a step closer to that day when every unit of remnant inventory will be offered on the spot to every available buyer before connecting with the optimal creative execution.

AdBrite is the Internet’s 17th ranked ad network (comScore, February 2008), reaching approximately 82 million monthly unique users last month. Comscore ranks the network fourth in page views however, with 25 million in December, roughly the same as ValueClick.