Appnexus is a RTB platform and a DSP (and a whole lot of other things they do). OpenX is/was an exchange and is generally the #1 place for buying/selling dodgy af traffic.
Neither does what Adsense does per se. What Adsense does is it reads the content of the page, and loads relevant ads from from its database of ads (things people put in adwords) and from GDN (also things people put in AdWords, and DBM, only they're pictures). The GDN bit has always been a bit icky IMO.
So, no, they aren't alternatives. Chiticka and others WERE alternatives, but there was a quality control issue (also supply side issues, because Google is a HUGE brand) which led to their eventual demise and/or pivots to waaaay dodgier practices like popunders.
Since you seem to know the industry well, what are the top resources (of any kind) to study the current state of online advertising for an advanced audience? Both from the technical side, and from the advertiser's business side. At a level that you would ideally know and learn if you were working as an executive in the industry.
I actually wrote a 10 page article on this for an internal audience. If people are interested I could clean it up and post it somewhere. Otherwise, the knowledge is scattered over blogs, ad exchanger, etc.
I'm interested. Please let me know if you publish it. Trying to get a better understanding about the industry, but the information is hard to find or scattered all over the Web.
Because a lot of the value is not just from the page (and note that taking a page plus pictures plus site, NLP on that, etc is not an easy thing to do) but also from your navigation around the internet and previous google searches. Putting that all together is hard and requires approaching Google scale.
Well, the hard part is dealing with fraud, not letting fraud compromise your payouts, and giving value to both the publishers and advertisers in the meantime.
