The industry still lacks clear visibility into how fees are collected and distributed. It’s time to change that — with specific, actionable steps.
The programmatic supply chain is complex. DSPs, SSPs, data providers, exchanges, and verification vendors all play important and legitimate roles, and advertisers should expect to pay for them. The issue is not that fees exist. It is that it is difficult to understand them in a way that allows one to assess whether a fee is justified by the value delivered.
Most buyers see a CPM in campaign reporting and little else. Platform access, data activation, and measurement tools are rolled into a single number. SSP take rates, exchange margins, and verification fees rarely appear as separate line items. To fully reconcile the fee waterfall, a formal audit is required — and most advertisers lack the time, budget, or expertise to commission one. Even those who do often hit another barrier: contracts between supply chain partners frequently prohibit sharing fee data across parties. Transparency is not just difficult. In many cases, it is contractually restricted.
The Numbers Make the Case
Over the past few years, research from organizations including the ANA, ISBA, and Jounce Media have repeatedly documented the same fundamental problem: a significant portion of every programmatic dollar fails to reach a publisher. Estimates of working media efficiency range from 50 cents on the dollar even at the premium end of the market, to 57 cents among top-performing advertisers with strong supply chain governance. The broader market average is widely understood to fall well below that range.
Across all of these studies, the underlying finding is the same. There is no industry standard for fee disclosure. Without one, questions about pass-through costs and take rates cannot be systematically verified by anyone, on either side of the transaction.
Publishers Want This Too
The transparency conversation often focuses on the buy side. Publishers face the same opacity from the other direction — and the consequences are just as real.
A publisher may sell inventory through an SSP with limited visibility into what is deducted before revenue is returned. What is the actual take rate on a given impression? What does the ad server layer add? Who is setting floor prices, and how? Publishers often do not know, which makes it harder to forecast revenue, optimize yield, or evaluate partners effectively.
Initiatives like sellers.json and ads.txt were important steps, but they address identity, not economics. They show who is selling, not what each party keeps.
What the Industry Should Do
The industry is already moving in the right direction. The IAB Tech Lab’s Programmatic Governance Council is developing guidelines and standards to improve the efficiency and transparency of programmatic transactions. In parallel, IAB’s Project Eidos is working to define the data sets and taxonomies required for consistent measurement and reporting — a critical step toward aligning how performance and costs are understood across the ecosystem. Just as important is the contractual layer: IAB is developing a standardized set of terms and conditions for programmatic and ad tech, expected later this year.
Taken together, these efforts begin to lay the operational, technical, and legal groundwork for true supply chain visibility. But standards and frameworks alone won’t close the gap — their impact ultimately depends on how consistently they are applied in day-to-day practice.
As the industry works toward greater standardization, a set of practical, near-term steps can help move transparency forward:
- Standardized fee reporting. Every campaign report includes a fee breakdown as separate items — DSP, SSP, data, and verification costs listed individually. Fees may still be presented in a bundled CPM, but it should be clearly labeled as bundled and also available as unbundled line items. A brand or agency should be able to see exactly where each dollar went, the same way a mutual fund statement itemizes management fees, transaction costs, and expenses.
- Impression-level cost reconciliation. Buyers can request impression-level cost data to reconcile what they paid against what reached working media. If a campaign shows a $10 CPM, it should be possible to trace how much represented actual media cost versus fees accumulated across the chain.
- Explicit opt-in for additional tools and services. When a platform enrolls a client in a tool or service that carries a fee, that enrollment requires explicit authorization — not just bundled in the terms of service — but with the fee disclosed upfront and visible as a named line item in reporting.
- Publisher-side revenue transparency. SSPs provide publishers with a standardized breakdown per impression: gross revenue, fees deducted, and net payment. A publisher should be able to see, for any given deal, what the buyer paid and what they received.
- A common fee taxonomy. Right now, “platform fee,” “tech fee,” and “service fee” can mean different things across vendors and contracts. A shared taxonomy defining fee types consistently across the supply chain is the foundation everything else depends on — and a logical starting point for broader standardization.
Platform fees are a normal part of doing business in programmatic. But charging a fee and justifying it requires greater fidelity and transparency than the current state. For advertisers trying to optimize, publishers trying to understand their revenue, and an open internet that depends on a trusted supply chain — transparency is what makes the difference.
