The Death of the SSP is Wildly Overstated and Nothing To Wish For
By now, you have heard the story. SSPs are obsolete and in terminal decline. They are an unnecessary hop in the chain. They are redundant; they are “resellers.” RIP to the SSP.
Not so fast. The death of the SSP has been vastly overstated, and it is nothing buyers or sellers should welcome. A market without strong, independent SSPs would be less transparent, less competitive, and ultimately worse for both sides.
A quick history lesson
DSPs emerged in the late 2000s to solve aggregation for buyers. The open web was chaotic, with display inventory scattered across thousands of sites. DSPs gave agencies a single interface to access that supply, automate decision-making, and deliver efficiency at scale.
SSPs developed in parallel on the sell side. Their function was to aggregate demand, represent publisher inventory competitively, and maximize yield.
Then things began to change. As the market matured, two parallel changes reshaped the role of both DSPs and SSPs.
First, new channels arrived. CTV entered the mix alongside display, and its supply was already far more centralized than the open web had ever been. Aggregation alone no longer defines the value of either platform.
Second, a series of quality crises shook confidence in programmatic markets. Fraud, viewability failures, unsafe environments, and a flood of made-for-advertising content created demand for new forms of assurance. Buyers wanted supply they could trust, and publishers needed partners who could validate the integrity and addressability of their inventory. That role evolved into what we now call curation.
Layered on top of this was growing dissatisfaction with the so-called “adtech tax.” Marketers questioned the number of intermediaries in the chain and the margins they extracted. This dissatisfaction helped give rise to supply path optimization offerings, which further blurred the lines between DSP and SSP functions.
It was at this moment that the claim began to spread that SSPs were redundant. The reasoning was simple: if DSPs can curate supply and buyers can strike direct deals with a handful of major CTV distributors, why keep SSPs in the mix? This argument gained momentum as SPO and “curation” became industry buzzwords.
Dispensing with semantics
With all of this blurring of the lines, it is worth pausing to dispel the semantics. Forget for a moment what is called an SSP and what is called a DSP. Instead, look at the value chain and how it balances the interests of buyers and sellers.
In a mature market, buyers say they want quality. Sellers want to represent the quality of their inventory and compete fairly on that basis. Curation and direct supply paths are the name of the game. The question is what technology functions are best suited to deliver that.
The answer lies closer to supply. The signals that prove quality originate at the source. Curation is best done where those signals are created. By contrast, DSPs rely on black-box algorithms, many built more than a decade ago, whose core purpose was to achieve cheap reach and preserve agency margins. Those systems aren’t suited to the current task of proving supply integrity - they simply aren’t built to manage or serve publishers.
The risk of the black box
This is also why it is dangerous to suggest that DSPs should take over supply-side functions. When a single black box claims to intermediate both buy-side and sell-side interests, history shows what happens: monopolistic structures that pit buyers and sellers against one another while capturing the margin in between. These are the very dynamic regulations that regulators are now trying to unwind in court with remedies to Google’s ad tech monopoly. To repeat it in CTV would be a step backward.
From the mid-2000s through the early 2010s, CPMs stagnated under vertically integrated buy-side control. It was only when SSPs and header bidding introduced real competition that publisher prices rose. Weakening SSPs would take the market back toward a single, integrated box that mutes competition and depresses yield.
A real alignment of interests
In a mature market, the interests of buyers and publishers are not fundamentally at odds. For years, it was said that publisher yield and advertiser efficiency pulled in opposite directions. That may be true in the narrow sense of an auction. But in the aggregate, buyers and sellers share the same need for efficient access to quality supply.
Every campaign outcome depends on the publisher environment. Advertisers need publishers to create content and engagement that make advertising possible. Publishers need advertisers to value that content appropriately. Both sides pay the price of opaque mechanisms in the middle that extract value without adding verifiable quality.
Multiple, independent SSPs provide more opportunities to demand, increased competition for each impression, and a more sustainable yield. A market with one or two vertically integrated pipes does not produce a quality supply. It starves it. And starving publishers ultimately harm buyers as well, because there is nothing left to advertise against.
The bottom line
The claim that SSPs are obsolete is not only self-serving, but it is also dangerous. Buyers who want quality supply should not wish for the removal of the very infrastructure that proves and sustains it. Sellers cannot build quality content if the tools that represent their value are stripped away.
Strong, independent SSPs are not inefficiencies to be eliminated. They are the layer that ensures both buyers and sellers get what they actually want: transparent, verifiable, trustworthy quality at scale. Without them, the market risks accelerating toward a future where publishers cannot fund content and advertisers cannot buy quality. That is not a future either side should want.
[Editor's note: This is a contributed article from TVIQ. Streaming Media accepts vendor bylines based solely on their value to our readers.]
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