by Alex Spencer // March 23, 2017
Facebook has opened up Audience Network, the third-party ad network it introduced in 2014, to mobile web publishers.
Audience Network uses Facebook’s user data for ads on apps and sites outside of its social network, enabling the inventory to be bought through Facebook’s own ad buying tools. This was originally limited to apps, but trials on the mobile web began last January with a select number of publishers, including the Daily Mail, Washington Post and Forbes.
“This test gave us important insights into the business dynamics between technology providers and publishers,” said David Jakubowski, director of Facebook’s publisher solutions. “With the way ad bidding happens in programmatic advertising, publishers are consistently losing margins to third-party middlemen who make the rules and obfuscate the truth. These are well-known issues, and they are being combatted through new technologies like header bidding. Header bidding is a more transparent bidding process where publishers see what every advertiser or technology provider is willing to pay for every impression.”