Before exchanges, publishers sold leftover ad space through advertising networks. These networks aggregated inventory from many sites, but didn't offer real-time bidding. In the early 2000s, Brian O'Kelley created the first ad exchange at Right Media, known as the Right Media Exchange, which officially launched in 2005.[5] Right Media's ad exchange built algorithms for predicting, budgeting, and pacing, which enabled real-time bidding (RTB). Yahoo acquired Right Media in 2007,[6] for $680 million, then shuttered the programmatic advertising DSP in 2014.[7]
Around the same time, Jason Knapp and Fabrizio Blanco were also working on the concept of RTB at Strategic Data Corp.[8] Knapp filed a patent on their RTB technology in 2006.[9] In 2007, Google acquired DoubleClick and its ad exchange, AdX (now Google Ad Manager).[10]
Demand-side platforms were designed to help advertisers bid for digital ad space in real-time across multiple exchanges. Supply-side platforms allow publishers to manage inventory before adding it to exchanges.[11] During the mid 2020s, DSPs increasingly shifted from programmatic advertising to agentic commerce.[12]
