Can any average Joe sign up for these exchanges and start trading? Would be more than happy to lose a couple bucks playing around
You could play with https://contributor.google.com this works though Google's exchange and the gist is they bid on your behalf for ads that will get shown to you, you can then put arbitrary HTML in those ads. I saw one guy that was learning Japanese so he used it to display vocabulary words in place of ads. The major downside is it only works on ads that go to Google's exchange which is kinda random on most sites because of stuff like the article above. It ends up being a couple dollars a month to replace random ads on websites.