Despite the industry’s efforts, low-quality supply continues to be a regular component of the programmatic supply chain, according to July’s Jounce Media report, which found that top supply-side platforms (SSPs) often sell as much inventory from premium publishers as sub-premium.

Inventory classified as sub-premium includes made-for-advertising sites, non-viewable ad placement, and inventory that could only be reached by unnecessarily long supply chains with extra hops. Premium supply, by contrast, offers a direct path to content proven to influence consumer purchase decisions, per the report.

Media quality has been a prominent agenda item this year, with the industry developing initiatives to stop money from flowing to made-for-advertising websites, spammy websites that are more in the business of gaming programmatic algorithms than serving readers. But wiping out junky supply is harder than it sounds.

“You cap your opportunity if you do not sell the junk,” said Chris Kane, founder of Jounce Media.

Within web environments, some of the largest SSPs, those that have the rights to monetize nearly 100% of the web’s premium supply, also monetize nearly all of the web’s sub-premium supply, Jounce found. There are some exceptions, the report found, which included Kargo, TrustX and Colossus SSP. Kargo, for example, monetizes 60% of the web’s premium supply and no sub-premium supply, having removed the trace amounts it did monetize after the report came out.

Jounce determined which SSPs had the rights to sell which inventory by combing through ads.txt and sellers.json files, which log the vendors that are allowed to sell the inventory.

The data shows that poor-quality media is routinely sold. SSPs are a fitting vector for analysis because they serve as a clearinghouse for all the content available to sell on the web. But SSPs are just one actor in a broader system that incentivizes the monetization of low-quality content, according to six industry sources. Agencies want to show good performance metrics to their clients at cheap prices, something MFA sites are designed to do. Publishers have long sought to juice demand, which can make supply chains convoluted. And middlemen ad-tech vendors don’t want to miss a sale.

Removing sub-premium inventory

So long as brands buy sub-premium inventory, SSPs feel they’ll give business to their competitors if they don’t sell it, Kane said.

When Jounce released its first report on MFA sites in 2021, a major SSP got in touch to say that while they didn’t monetize that inventory—and realized it was subpar—they had to make a change if their competitors were making money off it.

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