Streamers set a floor price for their online auctions, or the lowest bid they’re willing to take. For example, on Pluto, the average winning bid for one client was usually 55% above the floor, the buyer source said. By comparison, the winning bid for Tubi ads is usually 11% above the floor, and the winning bids for Sling TV ads are usually 29% above the floor.
Another ad buyer also noticed that for most streamers, the winning bid is typically between 0% and 10% above the floor, but for Pluto TV it’s 25%, based on several weeks of data collected during the spring.
Ad buyers take action to limit exposure to Pluto TV
Sources who confronted Pluto TV about this issue had mixed results.
One media buyer said they stopped buying Pluto in late 2022 because the streaming service wouldn’t explain why the bid volumes and prices were so high.
After a year of abstaining from buying Pluto TV, this person’s firm renegotiated to be able to tie the bid requests in the auction to viewers. Pluto is the only streamer this firm has negotiated with due to bid duplication concerns, this person said.
“They were really guarded about their data,” the person said. “They told me no one else asked for this.” That buyer eventually won more transparency and pricing concessions.
Other sources have had less luck confronting Pluto TV, including one adtech firm that first noticed a problem with duplicated bid requests around 2020.
The source observed instances of Pluto TV and its tech partners sending more than 300 duplicates of a single bid request. This level of duplication was not seen with any other streamer. “We had a conversation where they outright told us you shouldn’t be telling us how to operate our business,” an adtech source said.
This source’s company has taken steps to limit clients’ exposure to Pluto TV inventory.
Other sources address the issue internally
A third adtech company told ADWEEK it has built a tool to de-duplicate the bid requests coming from sellers, and started with Pluto TV because it was “the 900-pound gorilla in the room.”
