Ad

What is an "Ad" on the Internet?

Ad is an abbreviation for "advertisement." In most cases, the term "ad" refers to something displayed in a website or application that is not part of the website or application, but instead comes from a third-party who pays the developer to have their ad displayed there.

For example, a website about video-game tutorials may have a space for displaying ads, and then a company that makes video-games and launched a new video-game recently may pay the website to fill that space with an image that advertises their new game. This way, the audience of the website learns about the new product, and some of them may even purchase it, making it a worthwhile deal for everyone involved.

In most cases, Internet ads are processed by a third-party algorithm that matches publishers with ad-spaces to sell with advertisers with ads they need to display. The most well-known ad company in this category is Google. Most ads you see on the Internet, if you visit averages websites and not just large social media websites, are automatically decided by Google. This is how Google makes most of its money (as of 2024). When advertisers pay them, they take a cut, and then they give the rest to the website where the ad is displayed. This is also the main reason why many websites are infested with ads nowadays.

You see, some years ago Google launched a feature called "auto-ads" that automatically decides where the ads go on a website. Before this, webmasters had to manually decide where to place the third-party ads. This was complicated because ads make different amounts of money depending on where they are on the page, an profitable ad-placement correlates directly with how annoying the ads are. Webmasters had to balance how much money they need the website to make compared to how much they can afford to annoy their existing userbase. Google somehow convinced webmasters that auto-ads are better because it automatically chooses the most profitable placement so you don't need to do the A/B testing yourself. In practice, what this really means is that before a webmaster would place a single header, sidebar, and footer banner at most, mainly because it wasn't really practical or easy to place more ads than that, while "auto-ads" will just fill the entire webpage with ads every 3rd paragraph, display sticky ads at the bottom of the screen, and even show an ad popup if you click on any link that leaves the webpage.