Key Points

  • The digital advertising landscape in 2025 is dominated by three competitive vectors: supply, demand, and signal – with demand control emerging as the critical factor for success.
  • Publishers flooding the market with bid requests (competing on supply) face diminishing returns as automated bidding systems treat inventory as commodities.
  • Direct buyer relationships (competing on demand) have become the most valuable currency in ad tech, with sell-side curation opening new opportunities for publishers to wrestle control away from DSPs.
  • Signal manipulation (competing on signal) has created market distrust, leading savvy DSPs to bypass long supply chains entirely in favor of direct publisher integration.

The Ad Tech Power Struggle Intensifies

If you've been feeling like the programmatic ecosystem is a zero-sum game lately, Jounce Media's latest "State of the Open Internet" report confirms your suspicions with hard data. The 2025 advertising battlefield isn't just competitive – it's downright Darwinian.

The report, which tracks RTB-traded websites, mobile apps, and CTV apps through a combination of public disclosures and private data sharing agreements, identifies three distinct competitive vectors shaping the ad-supported open internet: supply, demand, and signal.

Let's break down what's happening on each front and what it means for your monetization strategy.

The Quality Revolution: Why Transparency Will Win the Supply Battle

Publishers hoping that simply flooding the market with bid requests will lead to success are in for a rude awakening. Jounce's analysis reveals a messy ecosystem where rule-benders have temporarily gained advantage, but a reckoning is coming.

The report exposes how many market participants aren't playing by established rules – from mislabeled ads.txt files to manipulated video placement types. While these tactics may drive short-term revenue, they're creating an unsustainable environment that's eroding buyer trust.

"Without credible governance of bidstream signals, the reliability of declared auction information will continue to deteriorate," warns the report. This erosion of trust is precisely why quality-focused publishers stand to gain significant advantage as the market corrects.

We're witnessing the early stages of a transparency revolution where:

  • Premium publishers with verifiable, high-quality inventory will command increasing value
  • DSPs are building direct relationships with publishers they trust rather than relying on questionable supply chains
  • Ad buyers are becoming more sophisticated about identifying and avoiding misrepresented inventory

This shift is already evident in comments from industry leaders like Will Doherty of The Trade Desk, who stated, "OpenPath's value to us is that it's the truth." The message is clear – supply chains that prioritize transparency and quality will outlast those built on signal manipulation.

Publishers committed to quality content and honest representation of their inventory are positioned to lead as this transformation accelerates.

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The Control Center: Why Competing on Demand Is the Strategic Imperative

The most valuable asset in today's programmatic ecosystem isn't your content – it's your direct relationships with buyers. Publishers and ad tech companies that control demand dictate market terms, even if that is through a sales house.

Jounce's data shows five major buy-side platforms (Google Ads, Google DV360, The Trade Desk, Amazon DSP, and AppLovin) now power nearly 70% of all open internet ad spend. But "power" doesn't necessarily mean "control" – and that distinction creates opportunity.

Publishers with direct buyer relationships can:

  • Create private marketplaces and programmatic guarantees that bypass open auction dynamics
  • Maintain pricing power instead of competing on a commoditized basis
  • Execute direct deals that command 12x higher CPMs than traditional programmatic

These publisher-controlled transactions represent a fundamental power shift. As Jounce notes, "Because the publisher creates nearly all of the value, ad tech platforms experience downward pressure on their take rates."

Direct relationships with buyers have become the critical factor for publisher success.

The Signal Wars: A Desperate Game of Diminishing Returns

What happens when publishers lack both differentiated supply and buyer relationships? 

They resort to competing on signal – manipulating bid request data to coax more demand from DSPs.

 

They resort to competing on signal – manipulating bid request data to coax more demand from DSPs.

Jounce identifies eight key signals that are widely misrepresented in programmatic auctions:

  • Ads.txt directness (labeling intermediary-controlled auctions as DIRECT)
  • Supply chain transparency (redacting nodes to create appearance of direct auctions)
  • Floor prices (inflating publisher hard floors to limit DSP bid shading)
  • Auction type (mislabeling 1st price as 2nd price to disable bid shading)
  • User IDs (populating through non-standard matching methods)
  • URLs (truncating to bypass content targeting filters)
  • Video type (mislabeling mid-article web video as instream)
  • Placement IDs (blending high and low-quality placements to prevent cherry-picking)

This manipulation creates a death spiral of eroding trust. "Signal fidelity and monetization success pull in opposite directions," the report states. "Publishers and sell-side technology providers that prioritize signal fidelity lose market share to their peers that take a loose interpretation of industry standards."

The result? Leading DSPs are increasingly bypassing long supply chains entirely in favor of direct publisher integrations.

The Signal Manipulation Playbook: 8 Tactics Eroding Trust in the Ecosystem

The Jounce report identifies eight critical bid request signals that are frequently manipulated to gain competitive advantage. Understanding these tactics is essential for publishers committed to transparency:

 

1. Ads.txt Directness Manipulation

According to the IAB Tech Lab spec, an ads.txt "DIRECT" designation should only apply when "the Publisher directly controls the account." However, many intermediaries label their relationships as DIRECT when they should be labeled RESELLER.

The report found that across the top proprietary placement operators, one labeled 40% of its supply as DIRECT despite being an intermediary, capturing demand from DSP campaigns targeting DIRECT supply chains while competitors accurately labeled themselves as RESELLERS.

 

2. Supply Chain Transparency Obfuscation

Some supply chain participants deliberately remove or modify supply chain (schain) nodes to create the appearance of direct publisher relationships. This redaction tricks DSPs into believing they're bidding on inventory from a shorter, more direct supply path than actually exists.

As buyers increasingly value supply path transparency, this manipulation helps intermediaries capture demand that would otherwise be directed to truly direct relationships. You can bet crackdowns will be coming soon.

 

3. Floor Price Manipulation

Publishers typically set minimum CPM thresholds below which they won't sell inventory. However, Jounce discovered that the same impression with a publisher-set floor of $0.60 CPM was being presented to DSPs with dramatically different declared floors—sometimes as low as $0.57 and as high as $1.02.

This inconsistency prevents DSPs from accurately understanding the true market value of inventory and can coax unnecessarily high bids from buyers.

 

4. Auction Type Misrepresentation

The industry has largely moved to first-price auctions, but some intermediaries still label their auctions as second-price. This misleading signal can trick DSP bidding algorithms into bidding higher than necessary, as they assume bid shading will be applied differently.

This creates an unfair advantage for intermediaries willing to misrepresent auction mechanics at the expense of transparent market participants.

 

5. User ID Fabrication

To capture user-targeted DSP demand, some intermediaries populate user ID fields through non-standard matching methods. This practice creates the appearance of user recognition where none actually exists, unlocking demand from frequency-capped campaigns and audience targeting.

The result is campaigns targeting specific users end up reaching completely different audiences. This is another tactic which is sure to receive backlash in the near future.

 

6. URL Truncation

Some publishers and intermediaries deliberately truncate site.page URL strings to bypass content targeting filters. This practice allows inventory from blocked or undesirable pages to appear as though it's coming from approved domains or sections.

This manipulation undermines advertisers' ability to control where their ads appear and damages brand safety protections.

 

7. Video Type Mislabeling

Following the redefinition of instream video in 2023, mid-article web videos should be classified as "accompanying content." However, Jounce found that 70% of accompanying content bid requests were mislabeled as "instream" to capture budget from instream-targeted DSP campaigns.

This tactic routes premium video budgets intended for true instream placements to mid-article players and interstitials.

 

8. Placement ID Consolidation

Some sellers blend high-quality and low-quality placements into a single placement ID to prevent DSPs from cherry-picking only the best inventory. This practice forces buyers to take the bad with the good, effectively hiding lower-performing placements behind the performance metrics of premium positions.

This undermines buyers' ability to optimize toward the highest-performing inventory.

The Transparency Imperative

These signal manipulation tactics collectively erode market trust and push sophisticated buyers toward direct publisher integrations. As Will Doherty from The Trade Desk noted in the report, "OpenPath's value to us is that it's the truth."

Publishers who commit to accurate signal representation position themselves for long-term success as the market increasingly values transparency. While signal manipulation might provide short-term revenue gains, it ultimately drives the most valuable demand toward publishers with verified, high-quality inventory and honest representation.

The message is clear – as DSPs build more sophisticated signal validation tools, publishers who've prioritized transparency will capture a disproportionate share of premium programmatic demand.

The Path Forward: Demand Control Is the Only Viable Strategy

The report delivers an unambiguous verdict: "The future success or failure of every ad tech company and every publisher rests on its ability to control demand."

Publishers that fail to control demand face increasingly brutal options:

  • Competing to produce maximum bid requests for barely acceptable inventory
  • Becoming dependent on DSPs that view your inventory as a commodity
  • Watching intermediaries manipulate signals while your take rate diminishes

The good news? The emergence of sell-side curation has created new opportunities for publishers to wrestle control away from buy-side platforms.

"By decoupling the expensive part of ad tech (infrastructure) from the valuable part (decisioning), sell-side curation greatly reduces the barrier to entry," Jounce explains. "Where previously only the highest scale advertising platforms had a credible opportunity to manage programmatic investments, now any company with trusted buyer relationships can claim control of ad placement decisions."

Rewrite Your Monetization Playbook for 2025

The Jounce data makes it clear – publishers need to fundamentally rethink how they compete in programmatic.

Rather than maximizing bid requests across dozens of SSP partners, focus on building direct relationships with buyers through private deals, programmatic guarantees, and preferential supply paths. These relationships become your competitive moat in a market that otherwise treats your inventory as a commodity.

For publishers whose current strategy depends heavily on open auction demand, the report should serve as a wake-up call. The companies that thrive in 2025 will be those that successfully shift from volume-based supply competition to value-based demand relationships.

Want to learn how Playwire can help you take control of your demand relationships and maximize revenue? Contact our team to discuss how our direct sales expertise and advanced yield management can transform your monetization strategy.



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