What does media buying mean to you? The answer to that sounds completely different from someone in a marketing agency than from a digital marketer in a SaaS company. An affiliate marketer will give you yet another dissonant explanation.

There's a lot of confusion and unbounded misleading content on the web. People like to write about media buying. It's popular, and it's good for generating traffic. So you must be careful who you trust and place every bit of info in the right context.

At Similarweb, we are experts in digital marketing because we have the tool that analyses it. And we've done our homework, speaking directly with media buyers in the different industries.

So if you're confused about what media buying means, you've come to the right place. You'll understand the difference between media planning and media buying, learn how programmatic media buying works, what role it plays in affiliate marketing, and how performance marketing is related.