Facebook bulks up its marketing offerings, enables live streaming from desktop

The Facebook Audience Network is opening to six advertising tech firms, enabling organizations with websites and applications to make money with Facebook ads. It’s a major step for Facebook, which has faced criticism in the past for keeping its advertising network solely on its own platform.

The announcement means that Facebook is officially in the header bidding game without actually building its own header bidder. Instead, it will work with six major ad publishers— Amazon, AppNexus, Index Exchange, Media.net, Sonobi, and Sortable—to serve ads to users who previously wouldn’t have seen them because Facebook Audience Network was essentially a closed ecosystem.

The move has the potential to revolutionize the way ads are served.

“The introduction of Facebook’s real-time demand is forcing all exchanges to step up their game and increase the yield they offer publishers,” Drew Bradstock, senior VP of product at Index Exchange, told AdAge. “This will accelerate the death of standard tags which are offering publishers far less transparency and yield than they expect.”