Key Points

  • Sell-side inventory curation is moving both strategic control and margin away from DSPs toward sell-side technology platforms.
  • While curation fees appear to be in line with industry norms, their non-transparent nature represents a step backward for the ad tech industry.
  • The median effective margin for curated deals is 30%, with the median effective CPM at $0.51, comparable to traditional DSP targeting fees.
  • Half of all curated deal IDs carry no additional fees beyond standard exchange take rates, while the other half use three pricing models with varying degrees of transparency.

Curation Fees: The Shifting Power Dynamics in Ad Tech

In the ever-evolving ad tech landscape, a significant paradigm shift is underway that threatens to upend the decade-long dominance of Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs). Jounce Media's April 2025 Supply Path Benchmarking Report reveals how sell-side inventory curation is fundamentally reshaping ad tech power dynamics, moving both strategic control and margin away from DSPs toward sell-side technology platforms.

The Rise of Curation

The traditional RTB transaction flow has DSPs making targeting decisions and managing data relationships, but curation shifts this decisioning into the exchange layer. This change is profound – multi-seller curated deal IDs now represent a staggering 73% of total bidding opportunities in the programmatic ecosystem. 

While they likely capture less than 73% of actual DSP spend, this figure signals the aggressive efforts of sell-side companies to migrate DSP investments away from open auctions toward curated environments they control.

As the report explains, curation carries three industry-altering implications:

  1. Budget Portability: When buyers target curated deal IDs, the strategic control point shifts from DSPs to exchanges, making it easier for buyers to move investments between DSPs and reducing platform lock-in.
  2. Buy-Side Margin Compression: As DSPs handle simpler tasks, they lose opportunities to charge for value-added services and revenue sharing with data providers, ultimately facing pressure to reduce platform fees.
  3. Sell-Side Margin Expansion: Exchanges process more gross ad spend and have opportunities to participate in revenue sharing with third parties.

The Economics of Curation

Perhaps surprisingly, the Jounce analysis suggests that curation doesn't necessarily increase the total fees of processing an RTB transaction. The report identifies four distinct pricing approaches for curated deals.

 



Pricing Approaches for Curated Deals

  1. Zero Fee Curation (50% of bid requests): Half of all curated deal IDs carry no additional fee beyond the exchange's standard open auction take rate, typically representing buyer-curated marketplaces or exchange value-added packaging.
  2. Margin-Based Curation (34% of bid requests): These deals apply a percentage-based markup, with the median fee being a 14% take rate – well within industry norms for most instances.
  3. CPM-Based Curation (10% of bid requests): Fixed CPM fees (median $0.48) are applied regardless of impression value, creating sometimes irrational economics for very low or high-value impressions.
  4. Static Price Curation (7% of bid requests): The least defensible model, where deals always declare the same floor price regardless of market conditions, often resulting in fees exceeding 50% of transaction value.

Zero Fee Curation

Half of all curated deal IDs carry no additional fee beyond the exchange's standard open auction take rate. In these scenarios, the deal floor exactly matches the open auction floor for every bid request. These zero-fee deals typically emerge from two business activities:

  • Buyer-Curated Marketplaces: As brands and agencies develop more sophisticated supply path optimization strategies, they often ask preferred exchanges to create always-on deal IDs that package supply from buyer-determined lists of trusted sellers. Since the exchange is simply packaging a collection of publishers without adding third-party data, these deal IDs carry no added fees beyond the standard open auction take rate.
  • SSP Value-Added Packaging: Exchanges frequently offer pre-packaged solutions to brands and agencies, such as deal IDs that bundle Spanish language content, high viewability placements, or live sports content. While these deals don't create margin expansion opportunities, they do allow exchanges to capture market share from competitors.

Margin-Based Curation

The second most common approach applies a percentage-based fee calculated on the total transaction cost. In a margin-based model, there's always a stable percentage-based spread between the deal floor and the open auction floor.

Using a web video curated deal example from the report, with a 25% margin applied, the open auction floor is consistently 25% lower than the deal floor across all price bands. This indicates the exchange is accruing an additional 25% fee when buyers target the curated deal, which might be retained by the exchange, paid to third-party data providers, or shared with a curator.

While some margin-based curated deals carry high fees, most are reasonably priced. The report found that the median fee for margin-based curation is 14%, aligning with industry norms for data fees. Approximately 36% of margin-based fees fall in the 5-10% range, and another 9% below 5%, indicating most exchanges are pricing these deals fairly.

CPM-Based Curation

Some multi-seller curated deals apply a fixed CPM fee rather than a percentage. In these arrangements, the spread between the deal floor and open auction floor is always a set dollar amount regardless of the impression's value.

The report highlights a representative example where a web display supply deal floor is always exactly $0.25 CPM higher than the open auction floor. While this absolute amount is reasonable, the economic model becomes problematic at the extremes: applying a $0.25 fee to an impression worth only $0.20 implies a 55% take rate, while the same fee on a $3.00 impression might undervalue the data's contribution.

Across the full sample, the median fee for CPM-based curation is $0.48, in line with traditional DSP-activated third-party data costs. However, this pricing approach creates irrational economics when applied to auctions with very low or very high clearing prices, suggesting percentage-based models might be more appropriate.

Static Price Curation

The least defensible model involves curated deals that always declare the same floor price regardless of the open auction floor. While this might make sense for publisher-sold deals with committed prices and volumes, applying static floors to non-guaranteed open auction inventory is difficult to justify.

The report shows an example of a curated web video deal ID sold at a static $15 CPM, where half of the available requests have an effective curation margin exceeding 50% and an effective curation CPM above $8.00. This pricing approach is consistent with the non-disclosed, high-margin models that buyers and sellers have been trying to avoid for the past decade.

Static price curation represents just 7% of total curation bid requests, but its economics are concerning, with margins often exceeding 50% and effective CPMs frequently above $5.00.

Transparency Concerns

While the economic impact of curation may be neutral, the report highlights a critical issue: transparency. When buyers target curated deal IDs, they lose visibility into which data providers power the targeting and where their money goes. This marks a step backward for an industry that has been steadily moving toward greater financial transparency.

The report states the problem plainly: "It should not take a forensic analysis of the bidstream to understand the basic economics of a programmatic auction."

Activating targeting data in DSPs has two advantages that curation currently lacks:

  • Clear workflow showing which data providers power each targeting feature
  • Detailed reporting on the itemized costs of each targeting setting

The Path Forward

Jounce suggests that curation could still become a positive industry development if exchanges embrace transparency. Some exchanges are already providing itemized information to both publishers and buyers, and industry bodies like IAB Tech Lab are developing standards for distributing this information.

As the report concludes, "Curation is a win for SSPs and curators. Making it a win for the industry requires a step forward in financial transparency, not a step back."

Publisher Implications

For publishers, this shift in the ad tech power balance presents both opportunities and challenges. The growing prevalence of curated deals could potentially simplify the increasingly complex programmatic supply chain. However, publishers should be vigilant about how their inventory is being packaged and sold through these new mechanisms, and should demand transparency from their SSP partners about the economics of curated deals.

As curation continues to reshape the programmatic landscape, one thing is clear: the ad tech industry's center of gravity is shifting from the buy side to the sell side. Whether this will benefit the broader ecosystem depends largely on whether transparency follows this shift in power.

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