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There is some confusion about what a "publisher" means. A publisher is either an SSP (a platform where publishers are aggregated by flat contract fee on a time

There is some confusion about what a "publisher" means. A publisher is either an SSP (a platform where publishers are aggregated by flat contract fee on a time or traffic basis with guarantees) or a singular site. > There is no "ad tech tax" That is correct. You might get better revenues (as a publisher) dealing with SpotX (an exchange) over say...Viant (a reseller who acts as a publisher to SpotX), but probably won't do better on volume, which directly correlates to payout. Then again, SpotX may not pay you as much for your average demographic and volume as Viant, who wants your business more than SpotX. None of this is supply chain. The chain is not a chain, but more of an amalgam of situations that is affected by the market, as much as personal relationships. Conceptually, an ecosystem where anyone can consume from anyone (as a publisher) and feed from anyone (as an exchange). > The issue for publishers here is lack of scale You don't know that. In 2009, the economy was still recovering and ad-tech had been slapped hard in 2008, leaving banner ads at fractions of the previous years. They have slowly floated down a few more cents to where they are today, primarily due to better targeting, ad fraud, video, mobile browser support, and clickbait (er native) ads. > no cookies This was the comparison that led to the 4% revenue bump. If platforms do not pay forward to the publishers (because why bother, the platforms set their own cookies anyway), it suggests that publishers shouldn't bother with targeting. That's exactly what has happened. No platform consumes publisher targeting data in arbitrage, because it might be faked. Using something like Zvelo for context and your own cookies, you get a much better view of the client. > 2nd-price auctions, meaning they don't get enough high bids and don't get the full price for those bids Whatever "high bids" or "full price" means here, is nebulous. How an exchange decides to run auctions is often negotiated up front but is, ultimately, black box. What this has to do with publishers is confusing. Publishers rarely get paid off what the platform makes. You sign an order for a set period of time or slice of impressions unless you have traffic that is hundreds of thousands per day (an exeedingly small number of sites). In the case where you run a Real Time Bidding auction (header bidding), you might make some variable money. It's rare and wasn't even seen in the wild (ie IAB) till well after 2009. See this more recent breakdown: https://www.emarketer.com/content/why-tech-firms-obtain-most-of-the-money-in-programmatic-purchases https://www.emarketer.com/content/why-tech-firms-obtain-most...

shostack 7y ago
Do you have any good links to industry sticks and studies for publisher/platform deal pricing scenarios or ballpark rates for those pubs in the several hundred thousand impressions/day range?
manigandham 7y ago
Nobody in adtech confuses publisher and SSP. And why are you mentioning 2009? The paper is about data from a single week in 2016 from a single publisher. Did you actually read it? Scale is the main issue because publishers need to have users with cookies, then match cookies to high-value bids, and then receive enough competing bids from advertisers to see a real difference in rates. This is fundamental market mechanics. Publishers getting flat-rate deals is rare, not common. Most of the time they get paid on variable programmatic basis with some take rate by the upstream SSP. It's a supply chain because these vendors facilitate the buying of media inventory. That's the definition of a supply chain. You can build your own car after buying raw parts but that doesn't mean that there's no supply chain that lets you buy the finished product from Ford. The article you linked shows exactly where the money goes to in the chain. DSPs, DMPs, verification vendors are used to buy ads and they need to be paid. You can easily avoid it and deal with the publisher if you want, but advertisers don't because of the value they get from those vendors.

shostack 7y ago

Do you have any good links to industry sticks and studies for publisher/platform deal pricing scenarios or ballpark rates for those pubs in the several hundred thousand impressions/day range?

manigandham 7y ago

Nobody in adtech confuses publisher and SSP. And why are you mentioning 2009? The paper is about data from a single week in 2016 from a single publisher. Did you actually read it? Scale is the main issue because publishers need to have users with cookies, then match cookies to high-value bids, and then receive enough competing bids from advertisers to see a real difference in rates. This is fundamental market mechanics. Publishers getting flat-rate deals is rare, not common. Most of the time they get paid on variable programmatic basis with some take rate by the upstream SSP. It's a supply chain because these vendors facilitate the buying of media inventory. That's the definition of a supply chain. You can build your own car after buying raw parts but that doesn't mean that there's no supply chain that lets you buy the finished product from Ford. The article you linked shows exactly where the money goes to in the chain. DSPs, DMPs, verification vendors are used to buy ads and they need to be paid. You can easily avoid it and deal with the publisher if you want, but advertisers don't because of the value they get from those vendors.