You’ve come a long way in a pretty short time: As this infographic from Pretarget lays out, it’s actually only been eight years since the first online ad exchange, and since then the online ad industry has changed so quickly it’s demanded new processes for buying and selling ad inventory and targeting audiences (which has demanded new terminology, as well). Trading desks, DSPs, real-time bidding — those ideas have all solidified just in the last few years, and they’ve evolved to such an extent that in 2011, 16 percent of all online display inventory was available through RTB. In fact, as the infographic points out, in 2011, only two years after RTB became widely accepted across the exchanges, RTB was serving 12 billion impressions per day. Kind of appropriate that automation has made the market grow so quickly, right?
