u/DataBeat_adtech

Came across a piece on Pixalate’s latest CTV programmatic data and the 57% figure stood out.
57% of US open CTV programmatic spend went to large-screen devices like smart TVs. The remaining 43% went to mobile, tablets, and other smaller screens. What’s interesting is that all of this is still being grouped under CTV programmatic. If the device mix is this different, Are buyers getting enough transparency into what they’re actually buying and measuring? or Does the broader CTV label still make sense?
Open RTB also represents only around 18-19% of total CTV spend. So there’s another question around how much of the market buyers can actually see through programmatic?
There’s a measurement issue here too. An ad being served doesn’t necessarily mean it was viewed and a viewed ad doesn’t necessarily mean it got attention.
How are agencies/DSPs and Pubs handling the CTV vs. OTT distinction in actual buys?

We analyzed 35B+ impressions, $55M+ in monthly publisher revenue across 200+ demand partners for our latest US programmatic trends.

few things we stood out:

• Overall CPMs bounced back to 19.3% MoM and 43.0% YoY but the recovery wasn’t even across all the formats - Display CPMs was up 14.9% MoM, while Video CPMs are actually fell 3.4%, even though it’s still up 14.3% YoY.
• Desktop and Mobile device formats were almost at parity - $1.62 and $1.61. CTV also rebounded up 16.4% MoM to $6.39.
• On the integration side, AdX is now at 41% share vs. 42% for Prebid (That gap is getting pretty small)
• TTD was another interesting one.. its share of DSP revenue fell from 18.9% in March to 10.8% in August, while impression share edged up from 14.8% to 15.5%. Its CPM also fell 43% from $3.08 to $1.74.
• Traffic pulled back too, with sessions down by 8.9% but page views per session was up to 3.0%.

The big takeaway for us: programmatic demand is back, but the recovery looks very different depending on the format and buyer.

Jumping a little late on this, but the part I keep coming back to isn't the 2.15B, it's what happens operationally when audience measurement & verification sit with the same owner.

Measurement already decides a lot about how inventory gets valued and sometimes rejected right now if a report comes back bad you can take the audience number and argue the suitability call separately - because they come from different places. That's how most make good conversations go.

Once both carry the same name on the report, I am not sure that still works. Fewer vendors might mean less operational work, but that isn't the same thing as more visibility into how your inventory got scored.

Anyone here dealt with enough of these disputes to know whether it actually changes anything in practice?

All sharing the outcomes here August data from our publisher network shows a pretty clear summer slowdown, but there are a few signals underneath it worth watching.

Traffic - New Users grew 19% and Total Users 16%, while Sessions and Engaged Sessions both grew around 14%. At the same time, PV/session and Sessions/User softened slightly, pointing to shorter, more single‑purpose visits.

AI - AI was the fastest‑growing channel, with Sessions up 66% and New Users up 75%. Engagement held at 62%, so the increase wasn’t coming with an obvious drop in traffic quality.

CPMs - Overall CPMs fell 19.9% MoM but remained 25.0% higher YoY. Display was down 20.3% MoM, while Video was more resilient at ‑7.8% MoM and +40.1% YoY.

Demand - The pullback was broad. Google Ads fell 21%, DV360 18%, and The Trade Desk 37%, pointing more toward a market‑wide summer budget pause than a shift between individual buyers.

Integration - Prebid held the largest share at 50%, followed by AdX at 39%. CPMs fell across the major integrations, reinforcing that the pressure was on demand and pricing rather than a simple shift between paths.

Takeaway - Traffic is still growing and AI is becoming a much more meaningful acquisition channel, but summer demand is putting real pressure on CPMs. Video and CTV are holding up better than display, which may be worth watching as budgets start moving back into the market.

All sharing the outcomes here August data from our publisher network shows a pretty clear summer slowdown, but there are a few signals underneath it worth watching.

Traffic - New Users grew 19% and Total Users 16%, while Sessions and Engaged Sessions both grew around 14%. At the same time, PV/session and Sessions/User softened slightly, pointing to shorter, more single‑purpose visits.

AI - AI was the fastest‑growing channel, with Sessions up 66% and New Users up 75%. Engagement held at 62%, so the increase wasn’t coming with an obvious drop in traffic quality.

CPMs - Overall CPMs fell 19.9% MoM but remained 25.0% higher YoY. Display was down 20.3% MoM, while Video was more resilient at ‑7.8% MoM and +40.1% YoY.

Demand - The pullback was broad. Google Ads fell 21%, DV360 18%, and The Trade Desk 37%, pointing more toward a market‑wide summer budget pause than a shift between individual buyers.

Integration - Prebid held the largest share at 50%, followed by AdX at 39%. CPMs fell across the major integrations, reinforcing that the pressure was on demand and pricing rather than a simple shift between paths.

Takeaway - Traffic is still growing and AI is becoming a much more meaningful acquisition channel, but summer demand is putting real pressure on CPMs. Video and CTV are holding up better than display, which may be worth watching as budgets start moving back into the market.

asking because the topic came up internally and my instinct was -no, that's the stuff from 2016 that got vendors blacklisted but I'm not sure that's still accurate.
what's making me reconsider is that the blocked audience skews towards the readers you'd least want to lose, right? the ones who come back daily, high pageviews, actual loyalty. So the segment worth the most is the - one earning the least, which is a weird place to just leave things.
but I also remember why people hated it. Reinserting against explicit user choice is a different thing from serving a lighter Ad experience to someone who blocked because of autoplay video in 2019, and I don't know that the vendor category ever really made that distinction cleanly.
Anyone here running the lighter Ad experience, if so how did you land on where the line is?

That number is from a warc study run by charlie oscar, and it came up in a digiday piece about time selling ads inside markdown versions of its pages, built specifically for ai agents to read. sponsored faqs, basically.

the debate in the piece was whether that inventory is worth testing. some buyers said sure, clients are desperate for anything that moves ai visibility. others called it magical thinking. and then perplexity blocked time's agent ads outright and called them deceptive, so that part answered itself pretty fast.

but the 63/26 split is the thing I keep coming back to. if most of what determines whether an llm mentions your brand is accumulated brand equity, then almost every geo tactic being sold right now, content volume, visibility tracking tools, agent-readable ad units, is competing over the smaller quarter of the equation. honestly that's not nothing, a quarter is real. it just means the pitch most of these tools are making, that you can buy your way into llm answers, is overselling by a lot.

The practical read for anyone allocating budget: geo probably belongs in a test pot funded out of display, not as a line item that pulls from brand. and if the visibility you're chasing is mostly equity-driven, the boring answer is that brand spend is the geo strategy.

That number is from a warc study run by charlie oscar, and it came up in a digiday piece about time selling ads inside markdown versions of its pages, built specifically for ai agents to read. sponsored faqs, basically.

the debate in the piece was whether that inventory is worth testing. some buyers said sure, clients are desperate for anything that moves ai visibility. others called it magical thinking. and then perplexity blocked time's agent ads outright and called them deceptive, so that part answered itself pretty fast.

but the 63/26 split is the thing I keep coming back to. if most of what determines whether an llm mentions your brand is accumulated brand equity, then almost every geo tactic being sold right now, content volume, visibility tracking tools, agent-readable ad units, is competing over the smaller quarter of the equation. honestly that's not nothing, a quarter is real. it just means the pitch most of these tools are making, that you can buy your way into llm answers, is overselling by a lot.

The practical read for anyone allocating budget: geo probably belongs in a test pot funded out of display, not as a line item that pulls from brand. and if the visibility you're chasing is mostly equity-driven, the boring answer is that brand spend is the geo strategy.

August seller data is interesting- this is probably the first time we’re seeing the market pause on expansion and move into cleanup mode.
ads.txt growth is basically flat (net -881), but the bigger signal is underneath
→ Resellers turned net negative for the first time (-1,718) while direct stayed flat (+837) - publishers are cutting duplicate reseller paths and protecting the relationships that drive revenue.
→ TrustedStack led every SSP in lines added (+6.6k), the only one to top all three traffic tiers, while High-Traffic publishers contracted the hardest (-9.3k) as premium publishers lead the optimization wave.
→ 46% of Tier 1 SSP domains are now duplicated across intermediaries - nearly half of every auction an Established SSP enters is competing against itself.
Scale alone no longer earns a slot in a publisher's ads.txt. The SSPs gaining ground are solving a specific buyer problem.

August seller data is interesting- this is probably the first time we’re seeing the market pause on expansion and move into cleanup mode.
ads.txt growth is basically flat (net -881), but the bigger signal is underneath
→ Resellers turned net negative for the first time (-1,718) while direct stayed flat (+837) - publishers are cutting duplicate reseller paths and protecting the relationships that drive revenue.
→ TrustedStack led every SSP in lines added (+6.6k), the only one to top all three traffic tiers, while High-Traffic publishers contracted the hardest (-9.3k) as premium publishers lead the optimization wave.
→ 46% of Tier 1 SSP domains are now duplicated across intermediaries - nearly half of every auction an Established SSP enters is competing against itself.
Scale alone no longer earns a slot in a publisher's ads.txt. The SSPs gaining ground are solving a specific buyer problem.

August seller data is interesting- this is probably the first time we’re seeing the market pause on expansion and move into cleanup mode.
ads.txt growth is basically flat (net -881), but the bigger signal is underneath
→ Resellers turned net negative for the first time (-1,718) while direct stayed flat (+837) - publishers are cutting duplicate reseller paths and protecting the relationships that drive revenue.
→ TrustedStack led every SSP in lines added (+6.6k), the only one to top all three traffic tiers, while High-Traffic publishers contracted the hardest (-9.3k) as premium publishers lead the optimization wave.
→ 46% of Tier 1 SSP domains are now duplicated across intermediaries - nearly half of every auction an Established SSP enters is competing against itself.
Scale alone no longer earns a slot in a publisher's ads.txt. The SSPs gaining ground are solving a specific buyer problem.

What caught my attention wasn't so much the AI part MFA has been around for a long time
What I'm wondering is why, after years of SPO efforts, curated deals, MFA blocklists and all the focus on supply quality money still seems to find its way into these environments.

Maybe AI is making it easier to create low-quality content at scale OR maybe the bigger issue is that parts of the ecosystem still reward cheap reach & low-cost outcomes over actual quality..

It feels like there's a bigger conversation here than just AI. Is AI making the MFA problem worse OR is it simply exposing issues that were already there?

What caught my attention wasn't so much the AI part MFA has been around for a long time
What I'm wondering is why, after years of SPO efforts, curated deals, MFA blocklists and all the focus on supply quality money still seems to find its way into these environments.

Maybe AI is making it easier to create low-quality content at scale OR maybe the bigger issue is that parts of the ecosystem still reward cheap reach & low-cost outcomes over actual quality..

It feels like there's a bigger conversation here than just AI. Is AI making the MFA problem worse OR is it simply exposing issues that were already there?

What caught my attention wasn't so much the AI part MFA has been around for a long time
What I'm wondering is why, after years of SPO efforts, curated deals, MFA blocklists and all the focus on supply quality money still seems to find its way into these environments.

Maybe AI is making it easier to create low-quality content at scale OR maybe the bigger issue is that parts of the ecosystem still reward cheap reach & low-cost outcomes over actual quality..

It feels like there's a bigger conversation here than just AI. Is AI making the MFA problem worse OR is it simply exposing issues that were already there?

Been noticing a shift lately.

For years, the default assumption was that crawlers were just part of the web. Now we're seeing publishers like Reuters and TIME move toward approved bot lists instead of letting every AI crawler in.

What caught my attention is that this feels less like a copyright discussion and more like a value exchange discussion.

If an AI platform is consuming publisher content, what does the publisher actually get back? Referral traffic? Licensing revenue? Visibility? Something else?

We've spent years talking about which demand partners deserve access to inventory. Feels like publishers are starting to ask a similar question about AI agents and crawlers.

Curious how people here think this plays out.

Do most publishers eventually end up with crawler whitelists?

Or does blocking too aggressively risk cutting yourself off from a meaningful source of future traffic?

Been noticing a shift lately.

For years, the default assumption was that crawlers were just part of the web. Now we're seeing publishers like Reuters and TIME move toward approved bot lists instead of letting every AI crawler in.

What caught my attention is that this feels less like a copyright discussion and more like a value exchange discussion.

If an AI platform is consuming publisher content, what does the publisher actually get back? Referral traffic? Licensing revenue? Visibility? Something else?

We've spent years talking about which demand partners deserve access to inventory. Feels like publishers are starting to ask a similar question about AI agents and crawlers.

Curious how people here think this plays out.

Do most publishers eventually end up with crawler whitelists?

Or does blocking too aggressively risk cutting yourself off from a meaningful source of future traffic?

July data from our publisher network tells an interesting story: more users are arriving, but they're engaging less, while CPMs are moving sharply higher.

Traffic- New users grew 14%, but Sessions/User and Pageviews/User fell 2%, while Engaged Sessions/User dropped 29%. Social traffic grew fast, with X up 170%, Instagram 107%, and Reddit 47%. AI assistant traffic also grew 24.8%, led by ChatGPT.

CPMs- Overall CPMs rose 16.9% MoM and 51.0% YoY. Display was up 26.9% YoY, Video 41.3%, and CTV recovered 20.7% MoM.

Integration- Prebid regained share at 54%, while AdX held at 34% and TAM fell to 8%.

The takeaway: traffic is growing, engagement quality is getting harder to maintain, but buyers are paying significantly more for the inventory they value.

Sharing key signals from our latest Sellers Report: the market added 478.5K new ads.txt lines and removed 413.7K, producing a net of +64.8K. Resellers accounted for 56.9% of gross additions, the third consecutive month of reseller-led growth.
4 things that stood out:

• Reseller growth is outpacing direct - Until publishers shift more onboarding to direct, auction duplication keeps climbing, adding cost for buyers and carbon overhead for everyone.
• Mid-Traffic publishers are leading net growth - +25.6K, ahead of both High-Traffic (+20.3K) and Low-Traffic (+18.9K). First month in the series where the long tail didn't lead. The 501–2,000 rank band is in active expansion.
• PubMatic is the only SSP in all three publisher-tier top fives - Backed by 13% YoY Q1 revenue growth, CTV up 18%, and the June 2026 Creator Marketplace launch (first programmatic CTV auction for independent creator publishers).
• Auction duplication is getting worse for Established SSPs - 46% of Tier 1 domains are now duplicated across direct + reseller paths. That means nearly half of every auction an Established SSP enters is competing against itself.

What this really points to: supply path complexity isn't shrinking, it's compounding. The SSPs winning direct connections in 2026 (Ozone, Wunderkind) are solving specific buyer problems, like cookieless first-party data or behavioral CTV formats, not just offering more reach.

Sharing key signals from our latest Sellers Report: the market added 478.5K new ads.txt lines and removed 413.7K, producing a net of +64.8K. Resellers accounted for 56.9% of gross additions, the third consecutive month of reseller-led growth.
4 things that stood out:

• Reseller growth is outpacing direct - Until publishers shift more onboarding to direct, auction duplication keeps climbing, adding cost for buyers and carbon overhead for everyone.
• Mid-Traffic publishers are leading net growth - +25.6K, ahead of both High-Traffic (+20.3K) and Low-Traffic (+18.9K). First month in the series where the long tail didn't lead. The 501–2,000 rank band is in active expansion.
• PubMatic is the only SSP in all three publisher-tier top fives - Backed by 13% YoY Q1 revenue growth, CTV up 18%, and the June 2026 Creator Marketplace launch (first programmatic CTV auction for independent creator publishers).
• Auction duplication is getting worse for Established SSPs - 46% of Tier 1 domains are now duplicated across direct + reseller paths. That means nearly half of every auction an Established SSP enters is competing against itself.

What this really points to: supply path complexity isn't shrinking, it's compounding. The SSPs winning direct connections in 2026 (Ozone, Wunderkind) are solving specific buyer problems, like cookieless first-party data or behavioral CTV formats, not just offering more reach.

Sharing key signals from our latest Sellers Report: the market added 478.5K new ads.txt lines and removed 413.7K, producing a net of +64.8K. Resellers accounted for 56.9% of gross additions, the third consecutive month of reseller-led growth.
4 things that stood out:

• Reseller growth is outpacing direct - Until publishers shift more onboarding to direct, auction duplication keeps climbing, adding cost for buyers and carbon overhead for everyone.
• Mid-Traffic publishers are leading net growth - +25.6K, ahead of both High-Traffic (+20.3K) and Low-Traffic (+18.9K). First month in the series where the long tail didn't lead. The 501–2,000 rank band is in active expansion.
• PubMatic is the only SSP in all three publisher-tier top fives - Backed by 13% YoY Q1 revenue growth, CTV up 18%, and the June 2026 Creator Marketplace launch (first programmatic CTV auction for independent creator publishers).
• Auction duplication is getting worse for Established SSPs - 46% of Tier 1 domains are now duplicated across direct + reseller paths. That means nearly half of every auction an Established SSP enters is competing against itself.

What this really points to: supply path complexity isn't shrinking, it's compounding. The SSPs winning direct connections in 2026 (Ozone, Wunderkind) are solving specific buyer problems, like cookieless first-party data or behavioral CTV formats, not just offering more reach.