A demand partner, not a shopfront
Equativ, formerly Smart AdServer, is a large independent platform that brings programmatic demand to your inventory. Pyrobid gives your own advertisers a branded place to buy it. Both can run on the same page, and only one of them publishes a price.
Equativ publishes no pricing at all.equativ.com/pricing returns their not found page. There is no rate card, no revenue share figure and no minimum, anywhere on the site. Every path ends at Contact us, which is normal for a platform that sells to media groups rather than to individual sites. It also means the honest comparison on this page is a published price against a sales call, and we would rather write that than invent a number. Checked 16 September 2026.
What Equativ sells
Equativ is a supply side platform with an ad server attached. They describe themselves as an end to end media platform, and for a publisher the product is demand: an ad exchange, connections to the big agency groups, curation tools, header bidding that plugs into whatever you already run, and a CTV ad server for video inventory.
Their pitch to a publisher is yield. More buyers competing for the impression you did not sell, at a higher price than you were getting.
None of it gives your own advertisers a place to buy from you.
What Pyrobid sells
Pyrobid is a white-label self-serve ad server. An advertiser who already wants your audience lands on your domain, registers under your brand, funds an account, targets, uploads a banner and bids above the floor you set.
No exchange is involved and nobody takes a share. The deal is between you and the buyer.
Equativ answers what do I do with the impressions nobody bought. We answer how does somebody buy from me in the first place.
Where Pyrobid wins
A published price, a portal that already exists, and no account manager between you and switching it on.
You can read the price
$29.99 a month to a million impressions, $99.99 to five million, on the pricing page. Nothing is an add-on and nothing is negotiated. You can work out your own cost before you speak to anybody, which you cannot do with an enterprise platform.
Your advertisers get a place to buy
Signup, campaign builder, targeting, creative upload, payment and reporting, on your domain and under your brand. Equativ publishes self-serve language on their retail media product for a retailer and its brand partners. Nothing they publish offers a general publisher a branded shopfront for their own direct advertisers.
Live in about five minutes, with nobody on the call
Create a placement, paste a tag. No onboarding, no integration project, no minimum volume and nobody checking whether your site is big enough to be worth their time.
No revenue share on your direct deals
Stated permanently and publicly. What an advertiser pays you for space on your own site is yours.
Restricted verticals, said out loud
Crypto, cannabis and gambling publishers are supported. Take payment by bank transfer, invoice, cash or stablecoin and issue a voucher that redeems as ad credit, so no card processor gets a veto on your industry.
Sized for one person and one site
A publisher doing a few hundred thousand impressions a month is a normal customer here. At that size an enterprise platform will not return your email.
What your advertisers see
Your brand, on your own domain. They sign up, fund an account and build a campaign in five steps. You approve the artwork before anything runs.
Illustration of step one of the advertiser campaign builder, on your own domain under your branding.
A screenshot is still only a picture. The demo is the running product, read only, with the login published and nothing to install.
Side by side
Equativ details are taken from equativ.com, accessed 16 September 2026. Fields are marked not published where no figure appears on their site.
$29.99/mo
|
EquativNot published | |
|---|---|---|
| Commercials | ||
| Published price | $29.99/mo to one million | None, contact sales |
| Second tier | $99.99/mo to five million | Not published |
| Revenue share | None on direct deals | Not published |
| Minimum commitment | None, monthly | Not published |
| Free trial | 14 days, self-serve | Not published |
| How you get started | Sign up | Contact us |
| What the product is for | ||
| Programmatic demand and yield | Not offered | The whole product |
| Ad exchange and curation | Not offered | Included |
| CTV and server-side insertion | Not offered | Included |
| Header bidding integration | Not offered | Included |
| Your own advertisers buying direct | The whole product | Not published for publishers |
| A branded portal on your own domain | Included on both plans | Not published |
| Running your own direct sales | ||
| You set the floor on every zone | ✓ | Not applicable |
| Approve every creative before it runs | ✓ | Not applicable |
| Invoice, cash or stablecoin, then a voucher | ✓ | Not offered |
| Country, region, city, device, ISP and day-parting | ✓ | Included, for their buyers |
Read the middle group as two different products rather than a scoreboard: Equativ sells programmatic demand, and Pyrobid sells your placements to your own advertisers.
Your network keeps what you do not sell
Every ad request runs down a chain. Your direct deals get first refusal at your price. Anything unsold falls through to what you run today.
Choose Pyrobid if
- ›You want advertisers to buy from you directly, under your own brand
- ›You want to know what it costs before you speak to a salesperson
- ›You are one person with one site, or a small team
- ›You publish in a vertical that mainstream platforms will not touch
Common questions
Is Equativ the same as Smart AdServer?
Yes. Smart AdServer rebranded to Equativ, and Sharethrough is part of the same group. Older documentation and case studies under the Smart AdServer name are the same lineage, so do not be thrown by the two names when you are researching.
What does Equativ cost?
Not published. They publish no price, no revenue share and no minimum, so nobody can tell you what it costs without a sales conversation. Ours is on the page: $29.99 and $99.99 a month.
Does Equativ have a self-serve advertiser portal?
The word self-serve appears on their retail media pages, describing a platform for a retailer and the brands that advertise with it. We could not find anything published offering a general publisher a branded portal where that publisher's own advertisers sign up and buy. That portal is what Pyrobid is.
Can I run both?
In principle yes, and for a large publisher it is the obvious shape: sell your best placements directly through your own portal, and let programmatic fill the rest. Our fallback runs in the page rather than in an iframe, so what you have not sold passes through to whatever you already run, apart from one view in ten that shows your Advertise Here card by default.
I am a small publisher. Should I be looking at Equativ at all?
Probably not yet. Platforms sold by a sales team have a size below which the conversation does not happen. Pyrobid has no such line: sign up today, at any size.
Which one brings me advertisers?
They bring different buyers. Equativ connects your unsold impressions to programmatic buyers on its exchange. Pyrobid is where your own advertisers buy from you directly, and your Advertise Here card sends readers who want to advertise straight to your portal. The advertise here generator and the blog cover finding the first ones.
What the advertiser actually touches
The screen on the left is the real product, on a live tenant. The right is what an advertiser gets from Equativ.
Equativ
Equativ sells demand to publishers, not a shopfront for a publisher's own advertisers. Their buyer side screens are for media buyers trading across the exchange, which is a different job from a brand landing on your site and buying your leaderboard. So there is nothing here that lines up against the screen on the left.
No call, no quote, no minimum.
Fourteen days free and a price you can read on the way in. Whatever fills your inventory today keeps filling it underneath the whole time.
Start free trial14 days free. Your existing ads keep running. Cancel anytime.
Equativ details come from equativ.com, chiefly their monetisation and SSP page and their retail media page, checked 16 September 2026. Every commercial field is marked not published because no figure appears anywhere on their site, and equativ.com/pricing returns a not found page. Pyrobid prices are our own, published at /pricing/. See also Pyrobid vs DanAds and the rest of the comparisons.