Programmatic
Take rate
Take rate is the percentage of the money flowing through an ad tech platform that it keeps as its fee: platform revenue divided by the gross spend it handles.
Take rate measures how big a slice a middleman keeps. If advertisers spend US$100 through a DSP and the DSP keeps US$15, its take rate is 15%. The same concept applies to SSPs, exchanges, curators and marketplaces generally.
Take rate is central to how investors read ad tech businesses. A company reporting net revenue (only its fee) will look much smaller than one reporting gross revenue, so comparing companies requires knowing their take rate and gross spend. Rising take rates mean more revenue per dollar handled, but can push customers to cheaper paths.
For buyers and publishers, the sum of all take rates along the chain adds up to the ad tech tax. Fees can be explicit (a stated percentage) or hidden (margins taken in auctions, data fees, bid manipulation). Transparency studies such as ISBA and PwC's 2020 report tried to trace these slices and found a portion they could not attribute at all, the unknown delta.
Think of it like this
Take rate is like the commission a ticket reseller charges: the band sets the price, but the platform keeps a fixed share of every ticket sold.
An example
A DSP handles US$500 million of gross spend in a year and reports US$100 million of revenue: take rate = 100 ÷ 500 = 20%.
Related terms
Ad tech tax
The ad tech tax is the combined share of an advertiser's spend taken by intermediaries, such as agencies, DSPs, data providers, verification vendors and SSPs, before the rest reaches the publisher.
Gross vs net revenue
Gross vs net revenue is the accounting choice between reporting everything customers pay (gross) or only what a company keeps after paying partners (net), which complicates comparisons.
Gross spend (gross billings)
Gross spend is the total amount of advertising money that flows through a platform, including the portion paid on to publishers and partners, rather than just the platform's own revenue.
Revenue share
A revenue share is an agreement in which partners split the money earned by an agreed percentage, such as an ad network paying a publisher 70% of ad revenue.
Unknown delta
The unknown delta is the share of programmatic ad spend that could not be traced or attributed to any identifiable fee or publisher payment in the 2020 ISBA/PwC supply chain study.