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It refers to when the same company both owns the site/content and operates the advertising for it.

Google has search, maps, gmail, youtube. Facebook has its social media sites, Amazon has amazon.com, Yahoo has its own sites. Bigger publishers with enough scale also run their own ad infrastructure, for example Washington Post has some of the most advanced in-house adtech.

You want to flip this. Google/Facebook operate the ad tech and own the site (or, more accurately the audience) so they don’t need to deal with third-party publishers on a per-request basis at all.

The point is that selling ads on third party sites is not where the money is at these days. It’s in selling ads on your own properties. For Google, that’s YouTube, search and Maps. For FB, that’s FB and Instagram.