Audience Network

When it comes to social media, 'Audience Network' describes a service provided by social media companies, like Meta (previously Facebook), that allows advertisers to extend their reach well beyond the social media platform. Advertisers using the Audience Network can display their ads on a wide variety of 'third-party' websites, apps, and other digital platforms across the internet. For example, if a company were to advertise on Facebook and opt into using the Audience Network, their ad might show up in an app that serves as a news platform, a mobile video game, or (increasingly common with more AI capabilities becoming available) a 'dummy' website that looks and acts like a real site but isn't. These ads can use pretty much any targeting you might want, using all the user data (which is a lot) that these platforms have to work with. And the better part of this is that, more often than not, the ads fit into the kind of digital environment the user is already engaging with in a way that doesn't seem particularly jarring.