For now, the company is running ads that are sold by a third-party network, but Pudding Media plans to also sell its own ads in a few months.
Advertisements sold by a third-party network cover the $3,000-a-month bandwidth bills, with enough left over for the Mikkelsons to make a living — "despite rumors that we're paid by, depending on your choice, the Democratic National Committee or the Republican National Committee," Mr. Mikkelson said.
Either way, MySpace is unlikely to continue to run it as a third-party network.
The machine will not only work with our pods, but also a third-party network of pods.
The FAQ for the service says only that users can "Easily track ads from a third-party network, affiliate provider, or other URL you provide" and screenshots show dollar figures.
That might be especially true for companies like Amazon and Google, which have already run that playbook, and could leverage their dominance in cloud computing to put a significant amount of pressure on a third-party network like Snark AI.
"They want to grow their core business and leverage their data assets without having to share it with another company, and they need a third-party network to form these partnerships".
In a more general sense, running display ads via a third-party network could be a useful way for Facebook to test the waters for a deeper display strategy, making more use of the social data it has been collecting from third-party sites with its like buttons and other engagement levers.
In 2009, the New York Times succumbed to malicious ads, not from a third-party network, after the ads (and an unknown 'ad serving technology vendor') was "approved by the site's advertising operations team".
