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Advantages of a hosted ad server

An ad server is the core system that delivers ads to viewers and measures ad performance. All publishers and advertisers should use an ad server. You have 2 options when choosing an ad server. You can buy, download and install an ad serving software onto your own servers to run an in-house ad server. On the other hand, you can subscribe to a software-as-a-service ad server and pay a monthly fee to use their servers. They often charge a fee based on the number of impressions and traffic of your website or app. There are many advantages of using hosted ad servers and we’ll discuss them in in the next few articles: Part 2 - Cost Saving, Part 3 - Reporting

Time saving

To have your in-house ad server, you need to have extensive technical knowledge or hire some software developers or engineers to help you set up and operate the software. Each ad serving software is unique and has its own features so before spending a large sum on a software to buy, you need to spend time for a careful and thorough evaluation to ensure it meets your requirements.

When you outsource the ad server, you still need to choose the right ad server. However, it is a smaller and simpler commitment. You can simply sign up for an account, pay a subscription fee and begin serving ads. Many ad servers offer a free trial period and demos so you can quickly see if that ad solution is a good fit for your business. If you do not like it or it does not offer the features you need or want, you can switch to something else quite easily, especially during the initial stage.

Better ad serving performance

People are very impatient these days. Anything that does not load instantly will raise a red flag. Viewers will only wait up to a few quick seconds before they click to another page or simply close it. Page loading speed depends on all the page components, including ads, to finish loading. Therefore, if ads are slow to load then they will slow down the pages. Therefore, you want all components to always load fast but in this specific case, you want ads to load fast.

If you download and install an ad serving software on a single server, it is a single point of failure. If this server goes down, your ads will break. If your website visitors are from a different continent, ad loading speed will be slower for them, which is not a good thing. To solve this problem, you can install the same ad serving software on multiple servers or at different locations. However, it will make everything more complex and expensive. Good hosted ad servers invest in their infrastructure and utilize many servers at multiple data centers to ensure fast performance and reliability. To get the same scale with an in-house ad server, you need to have a very busy site or app that serves millions of impressions daily to make it worth the required investments.

Posted in AdServer for Publisher Selling Ads Directly by John Z December 28, 2021

Advantages of a hosted ad server (part 2)
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Advantages of a hosted ad server (part 3)
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