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The Big Story: The SSP Extinction Event

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People have been predicting consolidation among supply-side platforms for years. But a slow-moving trend suddenly intensified in the past week.

Yahoo shut down its SSP and laid off 1,600 people in its ad tech division. EMX filed for bankruptcy and owes creditors more than $50 million.

In addition to these extreme examples, there are signs of pressure in the SSP business. TripleLift laid off 100 workers last week. Magnite laid off 6% of its workforce in January.

What’s behind this stress?

Well, you could blame Google for weakening these companies. Its alleged anti-competitive practices in its ad exchange caught headlines in January, when the Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google.

But the SSP model has also changed in recent years. Header bidding democratized access to supply. Buyers had choice. Supply-path optimization was born. SSPs started competing on price and lowering their fees. Many inched closer to the buy side and negotiated deals with agencies. And tools like ads.txt and sellers.json made reselling more visible and excisable from marketers’ programmatic buys. These are trends that favored large, lean SSPs.

Zooming out, we’ve seen signs of consolidation in the SSP space for some time. Magnite swallowed up the video SSPs SpotX and Telaria. Sharethrough merged with District M in 2021. AppNexus was acquired all the way back in 2018.

On this week’s episode, we make sense of the latest twists and turns in the SSP space.

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