What is being sold
Not a page, and not a week of space on it: one viewing of one slot, by one person, right now. When you open an app or a web page, each ad slot on it is offered for sale at that moment, and the auction is over before the page has finished drawing. The next person who opens the same page starts a new auction for the same slot, so a busy app sells each of its slots again and again all day, one viewing at a time.
Who takes part
- The app or website offers the slot, together with what it is allowed to say about the viewing: the kind of app or page, the size and position of the slot, the device, roughly where it is, and whether the person has opted out of interest-based ads. The offer carries no name and no email address.
- An ad exchange runs the auction. It sends the offer to the buyers connected to it, collects their bids, picks the winner and tells the app or page which ad to show.
- Buyers are software that bids on advertisers’ behalf. Each buyer holds many advertisers’ campaigns, and for each offer it decides, in a fraction of a second, whether any of them fits and what the viewing is worth to that advertiser. Software like this is called a demand-side platform. Ailumic is one.
What decides the winner
The best bid wins, and the winner’s ad is sent back to be shown. What the winner pays depends on the exchange’s rules: on some, the winner pays what it bid; on others, a price just above the next-best bid. Either way the advertiser is charged for that viewing only if the ad is actually shown. A bid that loses costs nothing, and so does a slot the buyer decides not to bid for.
What a bid is based on
A buyer does not know who is looking. It knows the slot and its context, and from those it estimates two things: how likely this viewing is to do what the advertiser wants — a click, a visit, a sign-up — and what the auction is likely to clear at. Then it bids what the viewing is worth to that advertiser, and no more.
The estimate comes from what similar viewings did before: the placement, the time of day, the kind of app or page, the area. Ailumic’s models are built to update that estimate as results arrive rather than once a week, so a slot that brought clicks this morning is bid for differently this afternoon. Every run teaches the next.
What it means for a small budget
The slot does not know how big the advertiser is. The same auction sells the same viewing to a one-person shop and to the largest brand in the country; a smaller budget simply wins fewer viewings. That is why no minimum is needed. Start with what you have — there is no minimum. You pay only for ads that are actually shown.
Where Ailumic fits
Ailumic is the buyer in this story, for you. You set a budget, an area, how many days the ad should run and the placements you want; Ailumic bids for your ad whenever a slot fits, pays only when it wins, and shows you afterwards where the ad ran and what it did. The price is in front of you before you confirm, and nothing runs until you do.
Ailumic is opening to its first advertisers in the United States and is not buying ads yet; the home page says where we are. The technical account — the protocol, the deadline, the checks made before a price is computed — is under the hood on the How it works page.