AppNexus: Powering Internet Advertising


Illustration by Kaitlyn Fitzgerald

AppNexus, the New York-based company that specializes in providing a platform for real-time online advertising, visited RIT on October 7, 2014 to conduct an information session about the organization. Currently recruiting students for technical positions, AppNexus also hires for a variety of other roles across all spectrums of the business organization structure. Bearing the distinction of being the largest independent ad tech company in the world, AppNexus is highly valued in the technology sector as a growing leader in the ad platform business.

AppNexus provides innovative solutions and marketplaces for internet advertising. The placement of advertisements works on an auction-based system, with algorithms designed by AppNexus performing the selection process for putting a specific ad in a specified spot on a website. This takes into account the user's statistics and behavior and tries to match the ad to the consumer in the most effective way.

On Halloween, AppNexus announced the acquisition of Open AdStream®, a premium ad serving technology. In addition, it also announced the completion of a new round of funding amounting to $110 million. AppNexus currently serves around 30 billion advertisements per day, and clocked $1 billion in net ad spend across its platform in 2013. Despite the scale and scope of its services, AppNexus is not as high profile in terms of visibility as one would expect, particularly for an organization of its nature. Primarily serving B2B, their forte is remaining unobtrusively present on the scene but working in the background to present seamless integration of ads into a webpage. While AppNexus may not exactly be a household name for consumers, it certainly is held in high esteem in the industry, with a valuation currently exceeding $1 billion and rising fast with the new round of funding.

​Being an independent firm, AppNexus faces stiff competition from powerhouses like Google and Facebook, who run similar services to their own. The same independence allows it to work silently without a lot of fanfare, reducing the interference into the end-user experience to a minimum. Given the focus on running ads as discreetly as possible, their competitors might want to take note.