Key Points for Publishers

  • Ad curation is redefining how programmatic inventory is packaged and sold, shifting strategic control from DSPs to SSPs
  • Curation allows SSPs to bundle publisher inventory based on rich data signals that DSPs cannot access, like scroll depth and user engagement
  • While CPMs for curated deals are typically 2-3x higher than open market rates, the actual incremental value for publishers remains in question
  • Half of all curated deals carry no additional fees, while others use pricing models ranging from percentage-based margins to fixed CPM fees
  • Publishers working with network partners like Playwire have significant advantages in navigating and benefiting from this evolving ecosystem

Why Ad Curation Has Exploded in 2025

The digital advertising landscape has evolved dramatically, creating perfect conditions for ad curation to thrive. Three major factors have accelerated this shift, fundamentally changing how programmatic works behind the scenes.

    • Signal Loss & Privacy Changes: Cookie deprecation plus iOS/Android privacy updates have severely eroded third-party identifiers. Buyers now struggle to find and verify quality inventory in the open exchange, making curated packages that pre-filter inventory based on first-party signals increasingly valuable.

    • SSPs Seeking Greater Value Share: Historically, DSPs owned the "curator" role by using their algorithms to identify the best impressions from the open exchange. SSPs are now capturing more value by offering their own curated packages, often enhanced with unique first-party data.

    • IAB Standardization Efforts: The ambiguity around curation has led IAB Tech Lab to rebrand their "Seller Defined Audiences" as "Curated Audiences," establishing common frameworks for deal discovery, schema versioning, and auditability—though adoption remains uneven.

The combination of technical necessity and commercial opportunity has created the perfect environment for ad curation to flourish.

 



What is Ad Curation?

Ad curation refers to the practice of SSPs and/or data providers bundling select publisher inventory into discrete PMP "deals" that are then surfaced to DSPs and their advertisers. In its simplest form, ad curation allows buyers to target pre-filtered inventory based on strong KPIs, brand safety, audience relevance, premium contextual signals, and other valuable attributes. Think of it as creating highly specialized "mini-exchanges" that limit the internet to just the good stuff.

How Ad Curation Actually Works

To understand ad curation, we need to look at how it modifies standard RTB workflows. The technical shift might seem subtle, but the commercial implications are enormous.

In traditional RTB transactions:

  1. An exchange presents a bid request to the DSP
  2. The DSP determines if the impression matches campaign targets
  3. DSPs apply third-party data to assess audience data and context
  4. The DSP accrues and pays fees to those data providers

Ad curation changes this by moving the decisioning upstream:

  1. Before issuing a bid request, the exchange pre-filters inventory
  2. The exchange decorates outbound requests with relevant deal IDs
  3. Each deal ID represents specific inventory characteristics
  4. DSPs or Buyers can target these deal IDs rather than applying their own filters
  5. The exchange handles the data fees and passes them through

This shift in workflow creates three major industry consequences:

  1. Budget Portability: Buyers can easily move investments between DSPs, reducing DSP lock-in
  2. Buy-Side Margin Compression: DSPs lose fee opportunities and face pressure on platform rates
  3. Sell-Side Margin Expansion: Exchanges process more gross spend and can participate in revenue sharing

The bottom line? Ad curation is moving both strategic control and margin from DSPs to SSPs and curators.

What Makes Inventory "Unique" in Curation

The most effective ad curation leverages data signals that DSPs simply cannot access. While domains, audience segments, and contextual segments are valuable, truly "unique" and high quality inventory requires publisher-specific engagement data that only exists on the supply side.

Here are the engagement signals that create genuinely differentiated inventory packages:

  • Referral Data: Traffic coming from specific sources (like Amazon shoppers)
  • Scroll Behavior: Active scrollers who reached at least 50% of the page before the ad placement
  • Engagement Depth: Users spending 2x the average session duration on site
  • Visit Patterns: Multi-page visitors (3+ pages in a session) or loyal returning users
  • Ad Exposure Sequence: "First Impression" inventory (Refresh 0) or "Last Ad Before Exit"

"DSPs can't tell if a user is on their third or fourth page in a session. They can tell viewability, but they don't know how deep a user is scrolling down an article," explains a curation specialist. "Publishers can do a lot more controllable things that a DSP can't do."

This data asymmetry is what makes ad curation potentially valuable—it enables targeting capabilities that simply don't exist in the traditional DSP workflow.

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The Economics of Ad Curation

When it comes to pricing, ad curation operates under several different models, each with its own implications for publishers. Understanding these models is crucial for determining whether your inventory is being properly valued.

Zero-Fee Curation

Zero-fee curation accounts for about 50% of Curated Deals, per Jounce Media.

Half of all curated deals carry no fee beyond the exchange's standard take rate. These zero-fee deals typically fall into two categories:

  • Buyer-Curated Marketplaces: Brands/agencies ask exchanges to create always-on deal IDs packaging supply from trusted sellers
  • SSP Value-Added Packaging: Exchanges pre-package inventory types (like Spanish language content or high viewability placements) to compete for market share

Even without additional fees, these deals still provide value by increasing buyer confidence and potentially improving fill rates.

Margin-Based Curation

Margin-based curation accounts for about 34% of Curated Deals, per Jounce Media.

In this model, there's a stable percentage-based spread between the deal floor and the open auction floor. The median fee is a 14% take rate, though some can reach as high as 80%.

"Across all price bands, the open auction floor is always 25% lower than the deal floor, indicating the exchange is accruing an additional 25% fee when buyers target the curated deal," notes Jounce Media's analysis of one publisher's setup.

CPM-Based Curation

CPM-based curation accounts for about 10% of Curated Deals, per Jounce Media.

This approach applies a fixed CPM fee (median: $0.48) to each impression. While straightforward, it creates irrational economics at the extremes—applying a $0.25 fee to an impression clearing at $0.20 implies a 55% take rate, while the same fee on a $3.00 impression might undervalue the data.

Static Price Curation 

Static price curation accounts for about 7% of Curated Deals, per Jounce Media.

The most problematic model, static pricing sets the same floor price regardless of the open auction floor. This often results in margins exceeding 50% and effective CPM fees above $5.00—economics more consistent with high-margin ad networks than transparent programmatic trading.

The key question for publishers remains unanswered: Does ad curation actually drive incremental revenue? CPMs for curated deals are typically 2-3x higher than open market rates, but whether this translates to higher overall earnings is still uncertain.

The Publisher Dilemma: Are You Actually Benefiting?

As a publisher, you're right to ask whether ad curation is helping or hurting your bottom line. The challenge is that participation often happens automatically without your explicit consent.

Here are the key questions publishers should be asking:

  • Incremental Revenue: Is curation generating net new demand, or simply redirecting existing demand through higher-priced channels?
  • Fee Transparency: Do you know what percentage of curated deal revenue is actually reaching you?
  • Supply Path Control: Who's making decisions about which inventory gets included in which packages?
  • Data Value: Is your unique first-party data being properly valued in these deals?

If you look under the hood at one of the SSPs in our stack, they're curating 48% of our revenue through PMP, which is a huge percentage. The CPMs are 2-3x higher than the open market. 

But did our publishers make more money in the end? Did their RPS go up? Did their fill go up? Did anything benefit them? Or are we just taking inventory that's already available on the open market and passing it through a curation layer where people are taking fees? These questions from our yield specialist highlight the core dilemma.

Without visibility into the full economics, publishers can't determine if they're actually earning incremental dollars or simply seeing existing demand redirected through costlier paths.

The Transparency Problem

Beyond economics, transparency remains ad curation's biggest challenge. In traditional DSP targeting, buyers know exactly which data sources influence their campaigns and what they cost. Curation muddies these waters considerably.

"The problem with curation fees isn't that they're high. It's that they're non-transparent," Jounce Media observes. "It should not take a forensic analysis of the bidstream to understand the basic economics of a programmatic auction."

Key transparency gaps include:

  • Undisclosed Participation: Exchanges often enable curated deals without notifying publishers
  • Hidden Fees: The spread between open market and curated floors isn't visible to publishers
  • Margin Variability: Some curated deals take reasonable fees while others capture over 50% of transaction value
  • Missing Attribution: Publishers can't see which of their valuable data signals drove performance

This opacity makes it nearly impossible for publishers to negotiate fair value for their inventory and first-party data. While curation might ultimately benefit publishers, the current implementation often leaves them in the dark.

Why Publishers Should Care About Curation

Despite the uncertainties, ad curation isn't just an adtech power struggle—it has profound implications for publisher revenue and strategy. Here's why you should be paying attention:

  • Curation is Already Happening: 73% of all RTB bidding opportunities now include curated deal IDs—it's affecting your inventory whether you engage with it or not
  • Premium CPMs: Curated deals typically command 2-3x higher CPMs than open market inventory
  • First-Party Data Valorization: Curation creates monetization opportunities for your unique engagement signals
  • Demand Diversification: As third-party cookies disappear, buyers increasingly rely on curated deals
  • Long-Term Strategy: The shift toward curation is likely permanent as privacy regulations continue to strengthen

Even if you're skeptical, understanding ad curation is crucial because it's already influencing how buyers access your inventory and how much they pay for it.

How Publishers Can Navigate the Curation Landscape

For publishers looking to take control of their destiny in this new environment, we recommend focusing on these key strategies:

1. Partner With Network Expertise

Individual publishers face significant challenges engaging directly with SSPs on curation. Working with an experienced network partner like Playwire provides several advantages:

  • Access to established SSP relationships with dedicated account teams
  • Aggregated scale that commands attention from curation decision-makers
  • Technical expertise to properly implement and measure curation performance
  • Data capabilities to identify and package your most valuable audience signals

For publishers without massive scale, specialized partnerships are often the only practical way to influence how your inventory is curated.

2. Focus on First-Party Data Value

The true differentiation in curation comes from unique user engagement signals that only publishers can provide:

  • Implement solutions to capture scroll depth, session duration, and content engagement
  • Create taxonomies for content categorization beyond standard IAB categories
  • Capture referral sources and track multi-page journeys within your site
  • Develop methodologies to identify your most engaged and loyal users

These first-party signals are the building blocks of effective curation, and publishers who develop rich data sets will have significant advantages.

3. Demand Transparency and Testing

While complete visibility may be challenging, publishers should advocate for greater transparency:

  • Request regular reporting on what percentage of your inventory is sold through curated deals
  • Ask SSP partners for documentation on fee structures for different curation models
  • Push for A/B testing opportunities to measure the incremental impact of curation
  • Compare revenue performance across different SSP partners to identify optimization opportunities

"One of the biggest challenges ad yield management teams face is keeping track of site performance and catching drops in performance as soon as possible," notes our yield operations team. The same principle applies to monitoring curation performance.

Knowledge is power in the curation landscape, and publishers who actively monitor and test will be better positioned to benefit.

The Future of Ad Curation

As we look toward the future, it's clear that ad curation represents a fundamental shift in how programmatic advertising functions. Several key trends are likely to shape its evolution:

  1. Consolidation: Expect significant M&A activity as SSPs and DMPs race to build comprehensive curation capabilities
  2. Standardization: IAB initiatives will likely create more consistent practices around fee disclosure and data parameters
  3. Publisher Empowerment: As the market matures, publishers will gain more control over how their inventory is curated
  4. SSP Differentiation: Second-tier SSPs will either develop unique curation offerings or face extinction
  5. DSP Response: Buy-side platforms will develop counter-strategies, potentially including their own curation layers

"There's a pool of fees to be captured with curation, and my sense is it's moths to a flame," observes our yield specialist. This competition will drive innovation, but also pressure on margins throughout the supply chain.

For publishers, the long-term impact will likely be a more segmented marketplace where premium inventory commands significantly higher CPMs, but with greater pressure to demonstrate unique value.

Navigating the Curation Revolution

Ad curation represents both an opportunity and a challenge for publishers in 2025. While it promises higher CPMs and better valorization of first-party data, it also introduces new layers of complexity and potential fee extraction.

Success in this environment requires a combination of technical understanding, strategic partnerships, and continuous vigilance. Publishers who develop rich first-party data sets, establish the right partnerships, and demand transparency will be best positioned to turn curation into a revenue advantage.

At Playwire, we're committed to helping publishers navigate this evolution, leveraging our scale, expertise, and technology to ensure our partners capture the full value of their inventory in this new paradigm. Our deep relationships with SSPs allow us to influence curation strategies in ways individual publishers simply cannot, while our advanced analytics provide the visibility needed to optimize performance.

The curation revolution is already here—the question is whether you'll be a passive participant or an active beneficiary. By understanding the mechanics, economics, and strategies outlined in this guide, you'll be well-equipped to make ad curation work for your business, not against it.

Ready to take control of your curation destiny? Contact our team to learn how Playwire can help maximize your revenue in the age of ad curation.

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