Why bother with resold inventory when you can buy direct?
Many CTV buyers have been asking themselves that exact question for years as they’ve watched DSPs and SSPs push intermediaries – and especially resellers – out of the supply chain in favor of direct publisher integrations.
The Trade Desk, which already had a strict no-resellers policy in place for its TV and video inventory, updated its policies in August to further define all supply-side platforms as resellers, too. CTV startup Vibe.co made a similar move in November by cutting out all supply-side resellers, and Cadent announced a week ago that all the CTV supply paths in its SSP product are now direct.
Sell-side platforms have mostly either applauded or downplayed the shift. To hear them tell it, weeding out resold inventory is a clear win-win: cleaner pipes, less fraud and more transparency.
But that neat narrative falls apart for smaller independent CTV publishers that depend on resellers and other intermediaries to monetize what little inventory they actually control. For them, these crackdowns look less like a cleanup and more like yet another revenue squeeze.
Small publishers under pressure
The situation, however, is nuanced. Reselling has become a necessary evil for CTV publishers.
Most independent CTV publishers distribute their content through third-party free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) services, like The Roku Channel, Samsung TV+, Paramount-Skydance-owned Pluto TV or Xumo, a joint venture between Comcast and Charter Communications.
Publishers typically negotiate with these services based on inventory shares, where distributors control a percentage of a publisher’s inventory (usually around 50%) to sell ads against.
But these deals pit publishers against their own content, said Scott Boos, chief revenue officer of Pursuit Media LLC, which distributes content related to hunting, fishing, shooting and other outdoor activities across both linear and streaming networks.
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A distributor like Samsung, for example, is able to offer buyers a greater level of transparency and richer metadata when it’s selling Pursuit Media’s inventory. Advertisers are therefore more likely to buy Pursuit’s inventory through Samsung’s sales channels, where Samsung control ad decisioning and server-side ad insertion, rather than via Pursuit Media’s own ad server. This, in turn, means less revenue for Pursuit and scant data about what kinds of ads were served since FAST services generally don’t share that information with publishers.
Unfortunately, Boos said, inventory share deals have become almost table stakes now. “We have no leverage in these conversations,” he said. “We just have to take the terms that are put in front of us.”
With limited inventory to work with, these publishers enter into agreements with resellers, ad exchanges and other monetization partners to fill their revenue gaps, said Scott Ryan, founder and CEO of CTV revenue operations platform TVIQ.
Yet selling bulk inventory to a reseller at a discount has its benefits in the form of upfront cash, which is why publishers do it. The downside only emerges over time. Reselling can lead to lower CPMs that devalue and commoditize inventory, according to DangerTV Founder and CEO Javier Saralegui, which distributes content related to true crime, law enforcement and survival stories.
For a lot of publishers, though, that short-term gamble is worth taking if it can help fund their direct sales capabilities and business growth.
What about the good resellers?
Meanwhile, there are some “good” resellers that differentiate themselves by developing specialized audience graphs, often with a focus on niche and diverse viewers.
Kivi Ads, for example, works with more than 50 independent CTV publishers serving Latin American and Spanish-language audiences. Similarly, PrismRiot, a programmatic ad exchange launched by LGBTQ+ streaming network Revry in 2023, offers access to queer and multicultural audiences across 3,000 different FAST channels.
These smaller niche players and their publishers often fall victim to programmatic hiccups, from false positives by fraud identification tools and inventory that gets misidentified across different platforms to sweeping anti-reseller policies that take them out of the supply chain entirely.
“I have longstanding relationships in the industry with a lot of people, and it’s helped our company a lot, because I can make a phone call,” said Chris Monteleone, CEO of Kivi Ads. “But if you’re a small FAST channel company, you may not have that ability.”
Revry ran into this issue with The Trade Desk last year, after it was blocked from selling PrismRiot inventory despite advertiser requests. When The Trade Desk recommended that Revry make its audience data available directly through its OpenPath product instead, Revry CEO and Co-Founder Damian Pelliccione penned an open letter alleging that “TTD sees the value in our data but wants to take most of the benefit for themselves.”
Alia Daniels, a Revry co-founder and its COO, told AdExchanger that she believes large players like TTD are incentivized to “knock out some of these smaller players” as a way to gain more control over their audiences.
“It feels very altruistic to just say, ‘No resellers, because then we can get rid of all of the bad actors in the space,’” said Daniels. “But there are a lot of good folks who are also getting wrapped up in that, and there’s no conversation to actually make sure that they’re still taken care of.”
Now what?
Unfortunately, major advertisers will most likely barely notice if independent publishers and their monetization partners disappear from the CTV ecosystem. It’s already common practice for them to avoid open exchanges entirely, instead favoring direct deals with the top 10 or so platforms that make up 90% of streaming impressions.
In 2024, the IAB’s annual digital video ad spend and strategy report found that 28% of programmatic CTV buys were transacted through an open exchange or DSP, and 22% through an ad network. But by 2025, the combined open market for programmatic CTV transactions had shrunk to just 29%.
This shift toward direct integrations means that small publishers can no longer depend on RTB as a reliable form of revenue generation, whether they work with resellers or not.
As recently as three years ago, “you could live on programmatic,” said DangerTV’s Saralegui, but this is no longer the case. Direct relationships with advertisers, private marketplaces and distribution platforms have become crucial.
But building and fostering direct ties – especially with diverse audiences in mind – could prove challenging in today’s political climate, where large brands are increasingly sensitive about taking public ownership of diversity initiatives for fear of possible government retaliation or, in some cases, consumer blowback..
“A lot of companies are afraid to stick their neck out because they’re worried about political backlash,” said Monteleone, a potential “death blow” for publishers already struggling from a sharp decline in DEI spending budgets.
Buyers need to “get more aggressive” about coming directly to publishers, who, in turn, need to demand better transparency and control over their inventory from larger media partners, TVIQ’s Ryan said.
In that vein, Ryan expects to see an uptick in publisher-led initiatives and cooperative partnerships to better address these challenges, such as the Framework for Publisher Empowerment that TVIQ released in October last year. In its current form, the framework outlines many of the challenges that publishers face in their dealings with streaming distribution platforms . It also offers suggestions for how to solve these issues, such as offering full transparency for why publisher inventory may be flagged for invalid traffic (IVT).
When publishers work together to create their own solutions, “you overcome some of the challenges that people have around working with intermediaries,” he said. “If it’s publishers working together, they’re not intermediaries.”
