The company that most likely determines which ads you get, and how much an advertiser paid to get on your screen, is Google.
Now, the algorithms that match ads to your interests are carefully calibrated, sometimes to an almost creepy extent. In the government’s depiction, there are three distinct tools that interact to sell an ad and place it in front of a consumer. There’s the ad servers used by publishers to sell space on their websites, particularly the rectangular ads that appear on the top and right-hand side of a web page. Ad networks are used by advertisers to buy ad space across an array of relevant websites.
Google said the system was necessary to ensure ads loaded quickly. If the computers entertained bids from every ad exchange, it would take too long.