• by Ray Schultz , January 18, 2023

Publisher revenue rose to 65% of advertiser spend, up from 57% in a 2020 study, according to the ISBA Programmatic supply chain transparency study II summary, a study conducted by a UK industry task force.

The percentage reflects what is left and makes it's way to the publisher after supply chain costs, including DSP fees and what the study calls “the unknown delta”: unattributable spend. 

The task force was made up of ISBA, AOP, IAB, IPA and individual members, with support from PwC. The study claims that this is the first time programmatic advertising supply chains were mapped out end-to-end, from advertiser to publisher, “anywhere in the world.” 

The new 2022 study excludes agency fees, verification tools and ad serving.

In addition,  to allow direct comparisons, it restated the 2020 results so that the unknown delta rose from 15% to 17% and publisher net revenues from 51% to 57%.  

The new analysis was completed over a nine-month period, versus 18 months for the prior study. 

“The unknown delta fell to 3%.. The match rate, the proportion of matchable impressions that were successfully matchable from buy-side (DSP) to sell-side (SSP) data, went from 12% in 2020 to 58%."

This nearly five-fold increase was due to:

“Higher quality log level data and essential data fields, which together enabled more deterministic impression matching form DSP to SSP data.

“Private marketplace (PMP) deals, which comprised approximately one-fifth of matchable impressions, had a match rate above 70%, in part due to Deal IDs facilitating impression matching from DSP to SSP.”

Matchable impressions, the number of impressions served to study publishers via study tech vendors totaled 104 million, compared to 267 million in the prior study.

The study urges publishers and adtech vendors working with the IAB to “agree consistent taxonomies and naming conventions for ads.txt and sellers.”

Publishers participating in the 2022 study included: Bauer Media, Future, Haymarket, Immediate, Independent, News UK, Ozone, Rightmove, Telegraph and The Guardian.  

The advertisers included Area Foods, Channel 4, Deliver, Diego, Dominos, PepsiCo, Sky, Tesco, Vodafone and two others

Among the agencies participating were Havas Media Group, GroupM, MiQ, and OMG. '

The DSPs included Adform, Amobee, DV360, MediaMath, The Trade Desk and Xandr. The SSPs were Ad Manager, Index Exchange, Magnitem ,OpenX, PubMatic and Xandr.