The four kinds of online ads platforms, the seven questions that separate them, and how to work out which one suits the site or budget you actually have.
"Platform" is doing a lot of work in the phrase online ads platforms. It covers systems that do genuinely different jobs, for different people, with different things at stake. Choosing between them is much easier once you stop comparing features and start asking who holds which decision.
Exchanges and ad networks aggregate inventory from many publishers and sell it to many advertisers, usually by auction, usually priced per thousand impressions. The publisher supplies space and receives a variable share. The advertiser supplies money and receives a variable amount of attention.
Self-serve platforms owned by a destination — the ad systems of large social and search products — sell attention on their own surfaces. There is no third-party publisher, because the platform is the publisher. Advertisers get scale, sophisticated targeting and fast testing; there is no version of these where a site owner sells their own space.
Direct marketplaces connect one advertiser to one publisher for a defined placement at a stated price. The publisher sets the rate and approves the buyer; the marketplace handles payment and delivery. Perch is one of these.
Selling it yourself — an email, an invoice, an image file uploaded by hand — is still a real option, and for a site with two loyal sponsors it is sometimes the right one. It has no fee and no platform risk. It also has no billing, no approval trail and no way for a reader to buy at midnight without you.
A site with modest but engaged traffic. Exchanges tend to reject small sites outright or pay so little that the banner costs more in goodwill than it earns. A direct space priced by the day does not care about volume — it cares whether one business wants to reach your readers.
A site that already carries advertising. The two are not exclusive. A direct space in your best position, with the network filling the rest, is a common and sensible arrangement.
A small advertiser with a local catchment. Buying named placements on relevant sites is usually a better fit than an auction, for the reasons set out in ads for small business.
A business that needs national reach quickly. The large self-serve platforms are built for exactly this and nothing here replaces them. See how that compares.
Own the pipeline where you can. Concretely, that means: keep the ability to set your own price on your own inventory, keep the right to refuse an advertiser, know what each payment was before the deduction, and keep a record of who your advertisers are that does not live inside somebody else's account. Those four things are not a product feature — they are what stops a website's advertising from being someone else's business that happens to run on your pages.
Perch is built to hold all four by default: your rate, your slot count, your approval on every submission unless you turn it off, a 25% fee stated on screen before you accept anything, and payment into your own connected account. If you want to see the mechanics rather than the argument, the help centre has the short version, and you can create an ad space in about a minute.
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