Programmatic used to be about finding your new potential customer while she was surfing a random blog or niche site. Accessing the long tail, which was hard to buy with directly.
But the latest trend is to cut off the long tail.
Last week, The Trade Desk shared the top 100 publishers in their S&P 500-style index of top publishers. They were ranked, in part, for the quality of their ad experience. Advertisers can choose to buy on the SP500+, just like they might invest in a broad stock index.
But the news also generated skittishness in the industry. This level of curation is new ground for a DSP. It could help publishers that are on the list, but could also hurt those who don’t make the cut.
Plus, if buyers truly do flock to the sites on the top 500 list, they could face higher CPMs as competition increases. Such a move would be great for publishers, but would likely rankle buyers (a.k.a. The Trade Desk’s customers). On this week’s podcast, we speculate about this latest curation move, and what it means for the future of the open internet.
Then, we turn to an acquisition deal our Senior Editor Alyssa Boyle covered exclusively this week. Seedtag bought Beachfront, a video SSP, as it seeks to gain a foothold in the CTV space with its contextual ad network.
The acquisition runs parallel to a number of other trends in the industry. First, pretty much every web-based ad tech company (including The Trade Desk, mentioned above) is running headfirst into connected TV. Second, products promising they will comply with newer privacy standards, like contextual advertising, are on the rise. The entry of a contextual player using ACR data to curate inventory by evaluating the content, including the tone of a TV show, could raise the nuance with which buyers can purchase and optimize their CTV ad campaigns.
