‘Almost a Slap in the Face’: Publishers Vexed by The Trade Desk’s Narrow Premium List

Unsurprisingly, The Trade Desk got its wish when it welcomed a little debate after releasing a list of top premium publishers last week.

Publisher critiques range from the demand-side platform favoring connected TV streamers and subscription-funded publishers—perpetuating inequalities in programmatic—to whether a tech firm should be the arbiter of media quality, five sources told ADWEEK.

“When stuff like this comes out, it doesn’t feel good,” said Jason Tate, senior director of programmatic and partnership development at MediaNews Group & Tribune Publishing, which represents 68 daily and over 300 weekly local publications across the U.S.

While The Trade Desk is typically a good partner, Tate said, the list leaves out local news publishers like MediaNews Group (although one title, Chicago Tribune, was included).

“It’s almost a slap in the face,” he added.

The list was part of a marketing pivot away from a purveyor of the open internet to a place to buy the “premium internet,” but others question whether The Trade Desk should be ranking publishers at all.

While the top 100 list is not intended for traders to buy on, all 100 publishers are part of SP500+, a group of more than 500 publishers that the Trade Desk will release later as a buying tool.

SP500+ includes local news and diverse publishers, a Trade Desk spokesperson said, declining to comment further.

“Fundamentally, they are a tech company,” said Wayne Blodwell, CEO of Impact Media, a media buying firm that prioritizes attention metrics. “They are not the arbiter of media quality.”

Not representational

A cursory look at the list shows that the top spots are predominantly taken by CTV publishers. Given that buyers already know the leading TV companies, a list is somewhat obsolete, said Paul Ripart, deputy director of digital and data at French publishing group Prisma Media.

“If you are based in New York and you have to buy inventory in France, it’s very complicated to know the good websites and the good inclusion lists,” Ripart said. “It’s really easy to know the good broadcasters per country.”

Separating lists into CTV and display inventory would have been more helpful.

The Trade Desk used factors like having a clean supply path, viewability and ad refresh rate to decide on the list—factors that are inherently biased against web publishers, said a data provider source who used to work for publishers.

“CTV doesn’t have ad refresh because it’s a different medium and they have natural viewability,” the source said. “Their ads are the size of the screen. You can’t compare to a [web] publisher.”

This methodology could also skew toward more subscription-funded rather than ad-funded publishers.

“If the only way you make money is ads, you might have more ads on the page to make money, which means you have high ad clutter,” Blodwell said.

Publishers are also tired of being evaluated by technical criteria at all, said Tate, especially when those criteria are constantly changing and publisher success is more effectively measured on valuable audiences.

“Some of [The Trade Desk’s] KPIs (key performance indicators) could be unrealistic [compared to] the industry standards,” Tate said. “We work on all these metrics in the same breath as getting the users to come back and [grow] subscribers.”

Arbiter of media quality

Several publishers see value in the list and the SP500+ even if they disagree with some of its particulars.

After all, the original philosophy of programmatic was that audiences were more important than publisher environments—an original sin that led to dollars going to low-quality websites.

“The SP500+ is more measured and thoughtful,” said a publishing source who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive industry relations. “I am pro MFA (made for advertising) sites losing budgets. A lot of this is marketing. They’re more trying to associate themselves with great brands.”

While sorting the wheat from the chaff could be helpful, publishers balk at The Trade Desk playing the role, feeling that they need to adopt The Trade Desk’s publisher-centric products, like UID2 and OpenPath, to make the list, Blodwell said.

“It’s mad to me that in 2024, buyers are outsourcing the decision of what quality is to a tech company,” Blodwell said.