When Everyone in Programmatic Is Making Less Money

Understanding the tensions reshaping buy-side and sell-side relationships

Wall Street analysts covering ad tech companies noticed something during Q3 2025 earnings calls: executives were testy. Not just nervous about numbers—though several platforms missed forecasts—but actively contentious about how the programmatic ecosystem operates.

Magnite’s CEO directly called out The Trade Desk for prioritizing OpenPath, its direct publisher connection. PubMatic’s CEO pointed obliquely at changes in how The Trade Desk’s Kokai platform operates, noting it works “differently from what we have seen.” Nexxen lowered its full-year forecast because expected Q4 spending didn’t materialize. System1 threatened legal action against an unnamed programmatic vendor over invalid traffic.

The drama spilled into public positioning about what various companies even are. The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green said Amazon doesn’t have “a DSP as we define it.” Viant’s CEO characterized his company as one of few “truly objective buy-side-only platforms,” implicitly calling The Trade Desk not objective. Multiple SSPs insisted they’re definitely not “resellers”—a designation The Trade Desk has been applying more liberally.

This isn’t normal competitive posturing. These are signs of an ecosystem under financial stress, with companies jockeying for position as the pie stops growing as quickly as it used to.

The Growth Slowdown

For years, the programmatic narrative was simple: digital advertising is growing, programmatic’s share of digital is growing, therefore programmatic companies grow. Rising tide lifts all boats.

That’s still true in aggregate. The DSP market is projected to grow from $38.92 billion in 2025 to $148.92 billion by 2032, a CAGR of 21.1%. Retail media spending continues accelerating. Connected TV ad dollars are shifting to programmatic buying.

But growth is slowing and becoming more uneven. Nexxen’s CEO noted that the typical October surge in advertising ahead of the holidays didn’t materialize in 2025. That missing wave of spending affects everyone relying on Q4 to hit annual targets.

More fundamentally, programmatic is maturing. Early growth came from shifting budgets from traditional direct deals to programmatic buying. That transition is largely complete. Future growth must come from overall advertising growth or share shifts between platforms—which means winners and losers rather than everyone winning together.

When markets mature, participants fight harder over their share. The tensions in programmatic reflect this transition.

The Reseller Fight

The Trade Desk has been increasingly vocal about “resellers” in the supply chain—intermediaries that add little value while taking fees. In The Trade Desk’s view, many SSPs simply resell inventory they access from other SSPs, creating duplicate bid requests and artificial complexity.

The issue isn’t purely philosophical. Every intermediary takes a cut. If inventory passes through three SSPs before reaching a DSP, each taking 15-20%, the media quality has to be exceptional to justify the total fees. Often it’s not.

For DSPs, cleaning up the supply chain means better inventory at lower cost. For SSPs labeled as “resellers,” it threatens their business model. Hence the sharp reactions from Magnite and PubMatic insisting they’re not resellers.

The definitional battle matters because it affects access. If The Trade Desk designates an SSP as a reseller and reduces buying through that path, it materially impacts that SSP’s revenue. According to multiple sources tracking bidstream patterns, this appears to have happened in Q3.

But the classification isn’t always clear. An SSP might have direct publisher relationships for some inventory and indirect relationships for others. Are they a reseller or not? It depends on the specific transaction, which The Trade Desk’s systems can evaluate dynamically.

This creates uncertainty for SSPs. They may not know exactly which inventory The Trade Desk considers “resold” versus “direct” and therefore can’t predict how changes in platform policies will affect their revenue.

OpenPath Changes Everything

The Trade Desk’s OpenPath offering creates direct connections between the DSP and publishers, bypassing SSPs and exchanges entirely. This reduces fees, improves transparency, and gives The Trade Desk more control over inventory access.

It’s also a fundamental challenge to the traditional supply chain. SSPs exist to aggregate inventory from many publishers and make it available to many DSPs. OpenPath disintermediates that function.

Magnite’s CEO stated directly that The Trade Desk made changes “that prioritized OpenPath as a default path for supply.” Magnite had to go directly to major agency buyers to reinstate a “preferred supply path” for non-OpenPath inventory.

This reveals the power dynamics. The Trade Desk can default to OpenPath, forcing publishers and SSPs to compete for inclusion in alternative paths. Publishers want access to The Trade Desk’s demand, so they’re incentivized to connect via OpenPath even if it means bypassing their existing SSP relationships.

For SSPs, this is existential. If most major publishers connect directly to major DSPs via paths like OpenPath, what’s the SSP’s role? They lose both visibility into transactions and the ability to take fees.

Some SSPs have responded by building their own DSP capabilities or acquiring demand-side technology. If you can’t survive as pure supply aggregation, maybe you can offer both buy-side and sell-side services. But this creates different conflicts—can you be truly objective when you compete with your own customers?

The Amazon Factor

Amazon DSP’s growth adds another dimension. As discussed earlier, Amazon charges minimal fees compared to independent DSPs. This puts pricing pressure on the entire market.

If large advertisers can run campaigns through Amazon DSP at 1% fees versus 20% at The Trade Desk, The Trade Desk needs to justify the price difference through better performance, superior technology, or other advantages. That’s possible, but it raises competitive intensity.

For SSPs, Amazon DSP creates a different challenge. Amazon has its own massive inventory pool—Amazon.com, IMDb, Twitch, Fire TV devices. Much of Amazon DSP spending happens on Amazon-owned properties where SSPs have no role.

As Amazon DSP share grows, the addressable market for independent SSPs shrinks. They’re competing for a smaller share of total programmatic spend.

The Data Access Issue

Underlying many of these tensions is a fundamental question: who should have access to what data?

DSPs want detailed information about inventory—which sites, which placements, what audience characteristics, historical performance data. This helps them evaluate quality and optimize bidding.

SSPs and publishers want to protect certain information—specific site URLs, individual user data, detailed pricing. This maintains leverage and protects publisher relationships.

The Trade Desk has pushed for more transparency, arguing that advertisers deserve to know exactly where ads run. SSPs have resisted, arguing that revealing too much gives DSPs unfair negotiating power and makes it easier for DSPs to disintermediate them.

This debate doesn’t have a clear right answer. Too much transparency lets DSPs bypass SSPs. Too little transparency enables fraud and low-quality inventory. The current system exists in uneasy compromise, which shifts as relative power changes.

Platform Concentration Effects

The earlier discussion of DSP market concentration (three players controlling 86% of share) applies equally to SSPs. A few large platforms—Magnite, PubMatic, OpenX, Index Exchange—handle most programmatic transactions on the sell side.

This concentration creates interesting dynamics. Large SSPs have leverage with publishers because they aggregate inventory at scale. But they’re also dependent on large DSPs for demand. When those large DSPs change how they buy, SSPs have limited options.

The Trade Desk’s strong Q3—18% year-over-year revenue growth, 16% profit growth—despite the drama suggests it’s winning these negotiations. SSPs can complain about OpenPath and reseller designations, but they still need The Trade Desk’s demand.

Over time, concentration on both sides could lead to increased direct relationships (like OpenPath) that bypass intermediaries. The programmatic “marketplace” might evolve toward a small number of bilateral relationships between major buyers and sellers, with independent SSPs relegated to long-tail inventory.

The Invalid Traffic Problem

System1’s threat of legal action over “significant invalid or nonhuman” traffic introduces another concern. The programmatic ecosystem has made substantial progress on fraud, but it hasn’t been eliminated.

When System1’s CEO said they’re seeking reimbursements from an unnamed vendor and may pursue legal action, it signals that companies are becoming less willing to accept fraud as a cost of doing business. This could lead to more aggressive contract terms, more frequent disputes, and potentially more litigation.

For SSPs, this creates additional pressure. They need to police inventory quality while maximizing inventory supply. Those objectives sometimes conflict. Being too strict about quality reduces available inventory and revenue. Being too loose risks fraud that damages relationships with DSPs.

The balance has shifted toward quality as DSPs demand better performance for their spend. SSPs that can’t consistently deliver clean inventory will lose access to premium demand.

Where the Market Goes From Here

Several possible directions:

Scenario one: Continued disintermediation. More publishers connect directly to DSPs via paths like OpenPath. SSPs handle primarily long-tail inventory and specialized formats. The middle layer of the supply chain shrinks.

Scenario two: Vertical integration. More companies operate both buy-side and sell-side technology. They offer end-to-end solutions, competing with the independent platforms. This is already happening with companies like Nexxen operating both DSP and SSP.

Scenario three: Utility layer consolidation. The SSP layer consolidates further. Three or four large platforms survive by providing essential infrastructure—fraud detection, header bidding wrappers, yield optimization—that publishers need even with direct DSP relationships.

Scenario four: Fragmentation. New specialized platforms emerge for specific inventory types or use cases. Rather than general-purpose SSPs, we see CTV-specific exchanges, retail media connectors, and format-specific platforms. The ecosystem becomes more complex rather than simpler.

The first and third scenarios seem most likely. Direct relationships will grow for premium inventory. Large SSPs will survive by providing technical infrastructure. Mid-sized platforms will struggle unless they find defensible niches.

What This Means for Advertisers

The infighting might seem like industry drama that doesn’t affect advertisers. But it has practical implications:

First, pricing will get more complex. As platforms adjust fee structures and inventory access, the true cost of reaching specific audiences becomes harder to predict. Advertisers need better visibility into total supply chain costs.

Second, inventory quality requirements will tighten. As DSPs pressure SSPs on quality, some inventory may become harder to access. Advertisers targeting broad reach may face trade-offs between scale and quality.

Third, direct deals will matter more. If programmatic marketplaces become more expensive or complex, direct relationships with publishers become more attractive. Agencies and brands may need to rebuild direct sales relationships they moved away from when programmatic seemed simpler.

Fourth, platform relationships become strategic. Choosing which DSPs and SSPs to work with isn’t just about features and pricing. It’s about which platforms will exist in five years and which relationships enable access to the inventory you need.

The Underlying Issue

At bottom, these tensions reflect a simple problem: there’s more intermediation capacity than the market needs. Too many platforms taking too many fees from transactions that could happen more directly.

The programmatic ecosystem developed this way because coordination was hard. Getting thousands of publishers and thousands of advertisers to transact required intermediaries to facilitate matching, pricing, delivery, and settlement.

But technology has improved. Direct integrations are easier. Large publishers can manage their own yield optimization. Large advertisers can operate DSP infrastructure in-house. The original value proposition of programmatic middlemen is less compelling.

That doesn’t mean intermediaries will disappear. But it means they need to provide value beyond basic transaction facilitation. Fraud detection, brand safety, format innovation, measurement integration—services that genuinely improve outcomes rather than just connecting buyers and sellers.

The platforms providing those services will thrive. The ones that are primarily taking fees for routing bid requests will struggle.

For anyone operating in programmatic, the question is: what problem are you solving that couldn’t be solved by direct relationships? Answer that convincingly, and you survive the industry’s maturation. Struggle to answer it, and you’re fighting for share in a shrinking pie.