What exactly is being resold? It starts to sound very suspect.

Tom Triscari, economist at Lemonade Projects

But in July, Salon caught up. RPMs were down 22% compared to July 2022. Operative’s data set, meanwhile, showed July 2023 CPMs down by 11% compared to the previous year. Where Salon was once performing nearly three times behind the market average, that gulf post-pruning its resellers narrowed to two times.

“The fact that they’ve seen some significant increases even on month over month or a few months over time, that’s impressive within this economy and the market,” said Sara Levitt, senior director of product marketing at Operative.

The questionable value of resellers

Resellers theoretically add value by adding another pipe of demand. But in the SPO-era of ad tech, publishers are seeking sell-side partners that make their content look more premium and not simply increase the volume of bid requests.

“The only reason for [resellers] is for incremental revenue,” said Tom Triscari, economist at programmatic consultancy Lemonade Projects. “What exactly is being resold? It starts to sound very suspect.”

Less well-known publishers might need to take demand where they can get it, and that means allying with other publishers in a resold group to attract buyers seeking scale. Brand names like Salon don’t need to play this game, Triscari said.

Salon eliminated resellers by removing lines from its ads.txt files introduced by its supply-side platform partners. SSPs will often introduce resellers into a publisher’s selling pathways at the beginning of the SSP-publisher relationship, Wohl said. Salon retained a few reseller lines from authorized resellers, like Wunderkind, Wohl said on a Digiday podcast in late June.

While it’s hard for publishers to ascertain how much of their inventory ultimately gets sold by resellers, Wohl said the number of lines that resellers made up in Salon’s ads.txt files outnumbered direct seller lines by five to one.

In removing resellers, Wohl has also been able to identify SSPs that weren’t driving much demand to Salon without the reseller networks. As a result, Salon has ended relationships with two SSPs.

“Without the reseller, [we] see their wins are pretty clipped,” Wohl said. “[Demand-side platforms] aren’t putting their buys right into those SSPs, but rather, those SSPs were creating business opportunities in the middle.”