Key Points

  • Curated deals are rapidly growing, with a little over 30% of Playwire's inventory now sold through curation in Q1 2025
  • One SSP leads the pack with 48% of their inventory sold through curated deals, showing curated CPMs running 2-3x higher than open market
  • Despite higher CPMs, the industry still lacks concrete data on whether curation actually delivers incremental revenue for publishers
  • SSPs are positioning themselves as the new curators in a post-cookie world, challenging DSPs' traditional curation role

The Rise of Ad Curation: What You Need to Know

Remember when everyone was freaking out about third-party cookie deprecation and what it would mean for programmatic advertising? Well, welcome to the post-apocalyptic landscape (ok, more like purgatory since cookies didn’t really go away), except it's not quite as bleak as we feared. In fact, there's a new sheriff in town: ad curation.

In the first quarter of 2025, ad curation has exploded from an industry buzzword to a dominant force in programmatic advertising. But what exactly is it, why does it matter, and most importantly – is it actually delivering incremental revenue for publishers?

 

 

What Is Ad Curation, Anyway?

At its core, ad curation is the packaging of publisher inventory into premium, pre-filtered segments that make it easier for buyers to target specific audiences or contexts at scale. It emerged primarily thanks to two forces: Google's privacy changes and the resulting ongoing deprecation of third-party cookies.

Think of curation as the answer to the question: "If I'm a marketer with a $100 million budget, how do I spend it when I don't know who I'm spending it on?"

In a world where DSPs can no longer rely on third-party cookies to identify users, curated deals provide a lifeline – allowing buyers to purchase inventory segments that have been pre-filtered based on first-party data, contextual signals, and engagement metrics.

Curation by the Numbers: Q1 2025

We’ve broken down exactly how ad curation by SSPs has played out with inventory across our entire ecosystem. Because this is more about education than it is about specifics, we’ve broken information out by SSP without naming specific SSPs.

Total Percentage of Inventory Sold Through Curated Deals

Percentage of Total Inventory Sold Through Curated Deals in Q1 2025

Our data reveals that curated deals accounted for a little more than 30% of Playwire's total inventory sold in Q1 2025. That's a massive chunk of inventory now being sold through these specialized packages rather than through the open market.

Breakdown by SSP

Percentage of Inventory Sold Through Curated Deals by SSP by Month in Q1 2025

As you can see, SSP 3 is leading the charge, with a whopping 48% of their inventory sold through curated deals – significantly higher than other SSPs in our stack. When we dig into the data, we can see these curated deals are commanding CPMs that are 2-3x higher than their open market counterparts, but whether that results in higher revenue for publishers is still a question we are researching and seeking to answer.

As you can see, each SSP varies significantly in how much curation they are doing. And, when digging even deeper, this varies heavily for each website in our ecosystem, with some SSPs favoring the audience of a site more than others.

The trend that is most clear from this data is that, on the whole, the majority of SSPs are all increasing the percentage of our inventory that is sold through curated deals as the months go on. This indicates that curation is only going to become a larger and larger portion of how SSPs sell inventory.

Breakdown by Ad Format

Percentage of Inventory Sold Through Curated Deals by Ad Format in Q1 2025

The other interesting data points that emerge are the breakdowns by SSP by ad format. It is clear that curation overwhelmingly favors video ad formats vs. other formats across all SSPs, but each SSP specializes in curating different ad formats.

Some more heavily curate display formats, while others specialize in native formats. The ultimate conclusion is that being involved with curation with multiple SSPs is most beneficial to publishers in finding valuable homes in curated packages for different portions of their inventory. 

The Billion-Dollar Question: Is Curation Actually Incremental?

Despite these impressive numbers, the industry is still wrestling with a fundamental question: Does curation actually deliver net-new revenue for publishers, or are we just shifting existing demand through a different pipe?

As our yield operations team puts it: "Are we just taking inventory that's already available on the open market, passing it through a curation layer where people are taking fees, and in the end, it nets the same final revenue for the publisher?"

The answer is frustratingly elusive, but one we are actively researching and seeking to answer for our publishers. While the CPMs on curated inventory are undeniably higher, it's unclear whether this translates to higher overall yield once you account for fill rates and the potential cannibalization of open market demand.

Jounce's recent industry report highlighted this exact dilemma, noting that "no one knows" whether curation is truly incremental. It's the question on everyone's mind, but we're all still waiting for definitive data.

Major Utility & Education Website Case Study

The Curator Wars: DSPs vs. SSPs

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the curation movement is the tectonic shift it's causing in the programmatic landscape.

Historically, DSPs were the curators, using their targeting capabilities to filter inventory based on audience, context, and viewability. But now SSPs are stepping aggressively into that role, leveraging their proximity to publishers and access to first-party data.

The Trade Desk fired the first shot with Open Path in 2023, effectively saying, "Hey, we don't need SSPs. We're going direct to publishers." Now SSPs are fighting back, saying, "We're closer to publishers, so we should be the ones curating inventory."

This isn't just positioning – it's an existential battle for who controls the flow of programmatic dollars. As one industry insider puts it: "Curation is clearly an opportunity for SSPs and clearly a threat to DSPs."

What Makes Inventory "Unique" in Curation?

So what exactly makes inventory "unique" enough to command those premium CPMs in curated deals? It's not just about having exclusive access to a particular website or app.

The most sophisticated buyers are looking beyond basic audience and contextual signals to engagement metrics that DSPs simply can't access:

  • Active scrollers: Users who are actively engaged with content, not just passive viewers
  • Session depth: Users on their third or fourth page in a session
  • Content consumption: Users who have read more than 50% of an article
  • Bounce-proof users: Visitors with low bounce rates who tend to explore multiple pages
  • Search originators: Users who arrived via search, showing high intent
  • Engaged video viewers: Users who consistently complete video content
  • Active commenter: Users who participate in discussions, showing deeper engagement

These engagement signals are typically invisible to DSPs but accessible to publishers and, by extension, to SSPs with the right integrations. This is where the real value of curation lies – in surfacing these "hidden" quality signals that traditional programmatic buying can't access.

What This Means for Publishers

If you're a publisher trying to make sense of curation, you're not alone. This paradigm shift has created both opportunities and challenges:

The Opportunity

Curation could potentially allow you to capture more value from your highest-quality inventory. Instead of selling premium impressions at commodity prices in the open market, curation packages them in a way that better communicates their value to buyers.

The Challenge

As an individual publisher, entering the curation game is extraordinarily difficult without the right relationships and scale. You need context, connections to SSPs actively building curated deals, and the ability to identify and package your unique first-party data.

Most publishers simply don't have these capabilities in-house, which is precisely why partnering with a monetization platform, like Playwire, that has established relationships with SSPs becomes increasingly valuable in a curation-dominated landscape.

Where We Go From Here

The rise of curation isn't slowing down anytime soon. If anything, we expect it to accelerate throughout 2025, with a few key trends to watch:

  1. Consolidation among SSPs: Tier 2 and Tier 3 SSPs will likely either partner up (as we're already seeing) or disappear altogether.
  2. More transparency around incremental value: As the industry matures, we'll start to see more concrete data on whether curation truly delivers incremental revenue.
  3. DSP countermoves: Expect DSPs to respond aggressively to protect their position, either by restricting their PMPs from being curated or by doubling down on their direct publisher relationships.
  4. New curation platforms: We're already seeing middleware platforms emerge to help streamline the creation and discovery of curated deals.

At Playwire, we're actively working with our SSP partners, DSPs, and curation experts to develop testing methodologies that will help answer the incrementality question once and for all. Stay tuned for more insights as we continue to navigate this rapidly evolving landscape.

The Bottom Line

Curation has transformed from industry buzzword to a dominant force in programmatic advertising in record time. While questions remain about its true incremental value, one thing is clear: the publishers who will win in this new environment are those who can effectively package and communicate the unique value of their inventory.

For publishers working solo, this is a massive challenge. But for those partnered with a monetization platform that has the relationships, scale, and technical capabilities to participate in curation effectively, it represents one of the most promising paths forward in a post-cookie world.

Are you getting the most out of your inventory in the age of curation? Contact Playwire to learn how we're helping publishers navigate this complex but potentially lucrative new landscape.

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