Commentary: Programmatic Advertising's 55% Take Rate Faces Scrutiny
· 3h ago · Originally reported by MediaPost
A MediaPost columnist argues that programmatic advertising is unusual in allowing intermediaries to capture roughly 55% of ad spend before it reaches publishers. The piece questions why this level of supply-chain leakage persists when other industries would not tolerate such a cut.
Why it matters
Every dollar lost to intermediaries is a dollar that neither advertisers nor publishers receive, so supply-chain fees directly affect campaign efficiency and publisher revenue.
Explain it like I’m new here
It's like paying $10 for a pizza and finding out the delivery apps and middlemen kept $5.50 before the pizzeria got paid.
Read the original at MediaPost
Terms in this story
Programmatic advertising
Programmatic advertising is buying and selling ad space through automated software, usually one impression at a time, instead of through manual negotiations, phone calls and paper contracts.
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.
Publisher
A publisher is any owner of content or a digital property, such as a website, app, streaming service, podcast or screen network, that earns money by selling ad space to advertisers.
Ad inventory
Ad inventory is the total amount of advertising space a publisher has available to sell, usually counted in impressions across its ad slots, pages, apps or screens.
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