CTV gets more dollars
The top 10 publishers on the list, except Spotify and National Geographic, are television publishers (Netflix, which is still growing its ad footprint, is notably absent.)
Bloomberg appears at No. 40, while The New York Times doesn’t appear until No. 51.
Typically, connected TV commands higher rates than open web advertising. In the second half of 2023, marketers paid 78% more for CTV ad impressions than for publishers outside the DSP’s top 500 list. But for web publishers, marketers only paid 11% more for those on the list during that same period, according to the report.
The Trade Desk’s list of top 500 sellers and publishers accounts for 50% of the DSP’s ad spend, the platform said. More than 500 publishers will be part of SP500+, which The Trade Desk won’t publicize as a list, a spokesperson added.
While the list published today is for chief marketing officers, SP500+ is for hands-on-keyboard traders, Doherty said.
Compiling the list
To decide who made the list, The Trade Desk used its own data and worked with metadata firm Sincera to provide data on the programmatic world outside of the DSP’s own bidstream, Doherty said. These signals are also used to decide SP500+.
Ad experience was a key variable, measured by factors like ads-to-content ratio, viewability and ad refresh rate. Publishers that don’t bombard audiences with ads are ranked higher, Doherty said.
Display ad impressions inside The Trade Desk’s 500 top publishers were 18% more viewable than from publishers outside this group, according to the report.
The Trade Desk also measures how transparently a publisher represents itself to buyers.
“The more transparent the inventory is, the easier it is to make decisions on,” Doherty said. “It’s ultimately the fidelity of the signals.”
Supply path efficiency—how direct the path is between buyer and seller—and distribution quality, which looks at a publisher’s audience, are also taken into account.
“Some publishers that have excellent distribution may have less original content,” Doherty said. “There were a few different ways you could stand out in the ranking.”