Media Briefing: Rising competition is making The Trade Desk bend a little, say OpenPath publishers

TTD bends to some publishers to smooth OpenPath deals

The detente between the Trade Desk and publishers is starting to look less transactional and more strategic. After years of tension over data access and margins, the ad tech vendor is now offering a clearer path — and better financial incentives — for publishers to directly access its advertisers’ budgets. 

It’s a strategic recalibration for the ad tech vendor. With Amazon and Cognitiv making aggressive plays for publisher relationships, The Trade Desk is trying to secure premium inventory outside the walled gardens. It’s betting on doing so with OpenPath, its direct conduit to publishers that launched in 2022. 

Initially, OpenPath sparked pushback. On paper, it was framed as a way for advertisers to get cleaner access to publisher supply by bypassing traditional SSPs. In practice, it’s been a point of tension. Many publishers saw it less as innovation and more as a power move — a DSP flexing its buying power to strong arm them into making ads available to it on its terms. 

But over the last year, the tone has shifted. New incentives, more outreach and a softer approach are beginning to reframe the relationship. 

“They’re definitely courting publishers a lot more, wanting to spend more time with publishers,” said an executive at a major news group, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity. “There’s a good but cautious relationship with them… I’m interested in their evolution,” he added.

Others echo the change. 

Seven execs told Digiday that about a year ago, OpenPath contracts came their way with very little wiggle room. That meant publishers walked away. But earlier this year, The Trade Desk returned to the table, agreeing to the conditions the publisher execs had set for the OpenPath contracts. These conditions ranged from adjusting billing periods (to less than 90 days) to agreeing to publishers’ own privacy policies and liability limits, and not forcing them to sign onto OpenPass — its tool for helping publishers with user authentication and data collection. 

“It was really them coming back to us about five months ago, and saying, ‘Oh, by the way, we can do what you want to do now.’ So we’ve definitely seen a change in… just being able to be a little bit more flexible,” said a publisher exec during Digiday’s latest virtual town hall for publishers.

The timing of this about-face hasn’t gone unnoticed. The Trade Desk is struggling on multiple fronts, from revenue growth slowdowns to earnings misses to significant stock price declines to competitive pressures from the likes of Amazon and Google. Viewed in that light, its newfound flexibility with publishers feels less like a change of heart and more like a strategic necessity.

“There’s definitely a little bit of internal pressure on their side to lock stuff in and move business forward, whereas before, it’s like, ‘Hey, they’ll come around eventually,’” said another anonymous publishing exec at the town hall.

In ad tech, time has a way of rearranging leverage. 

Over the past several years, TTD has dominated the independent DSP market, largely focusing on advertisers and agencies while leaving publishers to navigate the SSPs. That dynamic has been shifting as competition intensifies from other major DSPs, including Amazon, which has been on a supply growth tear, integrating publisher inventory directly to its DSP. The result is a marked change in tone from a DSP that once dictated terms to one that must accommodate publishers to maintain access to premium inventory. 

“Now there’s been maybe a little bit more of a competitive landscape,” said a publishing exec during Digiday’s town hall. “They’re working much closer with us to accommodate requests, reporting, improvements, things of that nature. Whereas I remember even as little as a year ago, those types of requests would not be materially considered by their team.”

Initially, these execs said they were concerned that the OpenPath deals would eat into demand coming from supply-side platforms. The deals haven’t included any CPM or revenue guarantees, either, execs said. But so far, they haven’t seen that cannibalization. 

A head of revenue and operations at a publisher — who requested anonymity — said overall, spend has increased and CPMs are up from $1.14 to $1.46. The Trade Desk is their biggest demand partner, they said. “The spread and amount they’re spending is continuing,” they said. “We get about 28% more on average CPM. That’s a significant amount of volume for what we do.”

The Trade Desk’s pitch to publishers has been that their OpenPath pipes are a more direct path to a publisher’s inventory compared to an SSP. The execs interviewed for this story said that does seem to be the case. The head of revenue said the two things they wanted from an OpenPath deal were incremental revenue and higher CPMs, and that’s panned out so far.

“In June, we did about $1 million through SSPs, and 202,000 directly. It’s a lot less than what we’re getting through SSPs. We’re interested to see if that increases or decreases over time,” the head of revenue said.

Langdon Miller, director of programmatic and revenue operations at Brainly, said he was dreading an arduous dealmaking process with The Trade Desk, but found it was pretty straightforward – especially compared to its LiveRamp deal, which was “super long.” The CPMs are about double Google’s CPMs for video ads, though Google is still higher fill and revenue, MIller added.

“We’re seeing them [TTD] occupying more towards the top of the stack when it comes to ,” Miller said. “They’re more in sales mode – more outbound than inbound.”

A head of programmatic at a publisher who requested to speak anonymously said they’d signed an OpenPath agreement at their previous company two years ago, and it was a lengthy process. But this year at their current company, they were “surprised” to find the process much more streamlined, they said. That means not having to take part in their beta testing, and other checkpoints before they could get the deal done. Now, about 60% of The Trade Desk’s demand comes from OpenPath, and the rest comes from SSPs, they added. Most of the publisher’s demand comes from SSPs, they noted.

Miller said the focus on publishers’ first-party data makes working more closely with DSPs an obvious path forward, as opposed to getting more involved with SSPs.

 “The idea that SSPs are becoming more and more obsolete and DSPs are getting closer and closer to publisher supply is not a new idea… [but] I understood the value there, more than I understood the value of, like, SSP curation,” Miller said.

When reached for comment, a TTD spokesperson pointed to CEO Jeff Green’s comments from the company’s second quarter earnings, in which he discussed publishers seeing increased programmatic display revenue and fill rates from OpenPath, and that The Trade Desk wasn’t attempting to get into the supply side of digital advertising but OpenPath was an effort to improve supply chain quality.

What we’ve heard

“The proportion of traffic that has originated from organic search… [for] some brands [that’s] already less than 20% of their audience…. Some are over 50%. So the brands that are over 50% obviously are more at risk than the others, so it just really depends on the brand.”

– Alysia Borsa, People Inc’s chief business officer and president of lifestyle, health and finance, on how some of its sites are more insulated from declining search referral traffic than others.

Reddit adds tools to help publishers engage with more users

Reddit has rolled out new tools for publishers to track shares, import content and spot the best subreddits to post their articles. These tools will be available in beta in a new “Links” tab.

These are welcome tools for publishers looking to grow their audience on Reddit, said Donna Ogier, Reach’s director of US audience. Previously, a lot of this work was done manually.

“Publishers previously would have had a very hard time really getting that lay of the land,” Gabriel Sands, Reddit’s head of news and lifestyle partnerships, told Digiday. “For a very decentralized platform like Reddit — with over 100,000 different communities — being able to take a lateral slice across the entire platform and see where your content is appearing is really valuable, and something that we haven’t been able to really offer before in this robust of a way.”

Publishers will have new metrics in their Reddit Pro dashboards, where they can track where stories are being shared and monitor metrics like views, upvotes and clicks, and see the total number of links they have circulating on Reddit and the total number of posts and subreddits where they appear.

They can also sync their RSS feeds to automatically import articles to their accounts to queue up to post, helping to streamline the process of sharing them across Reddit. (They won’t be able to automatically post those articles, though, to deter “link spam,” Sands said.)

Reddit has tested these tools with publishers like The Atlantic, The Hill, NBC News, and The Associated Press. It will roll out to more publishers in beta, and is aiming to make them available to all Reddit Pro accounts by next year.

Reddit’s role in publishers’ audience development and distribution strategies has only grown this year. It’s The Hill’s top social referral traffic source, for example. 

“Reddit is vast. Publishers rely heavily on a smaller number of subreddits where they previously found success. It risks making those subreddits overburdened by publisher content,” Ogier said. “By giving us more diversity in potential destinations for our content, it enables us to not only expand our reach but to also to be better citizens on the Reddit platform.”

Reddit users can also now access articles directly in its app rather than being taken to another browser, Sands said. He noted that 75% of Reddit users are reading news content on the site two to three times a week.

Numbers to know

9.4%: The decline in the number of human visitors to websites between Q1 and Q2 2025, according to a recent Tollbit report. Meanwhile, the ratio of site visits coming from AI bots compared to human visitors was 1 in 50, up from 1 in 200 in Q1 2025.

336%: The increase in sites blocking or redirecting AI bots over the past year, according to the Tollbit report. The percentage of AI bots that bypassed robots.txt in Q2 2025 was 13.26%, up from 3.3% in Q4 2024. 

$1.5 billion: The amount AI startup Anthropic will pay to settle a book piracy lawsuit.

€2.95 billion: The amount the European Commission is fining Google for breaching EU antitrust rules in ad tech.

$1: The amount it costs to produce an AI-hosted podcast episode by company Inception Point AI.

What we’ve covered

What to expect at the Digiday Publishing Summit, September 2025 edition

• AI will be the major theme at the Digiday Publishing Summit next week, Sept. 15-17, in South Beach, Fla. 
• Top media execs from Bloomberg, The New York Times, People Inc, The Washington Post and many more will take the stage to discuss how publishers are deploying AI agents for ad sales, developing AI-powered paywalls and updating their traffic and content strategies for the zero-click future.

Read more about what to expect at DPS here.

Betches launches new style destination for millennials and Gen Z

• Betches Media recently debuted Betches Style, intended to offer style guidance to its largely Gen Z and millennial women audience, with a heavy emphasis on TikTok and Instagram video content and series.
• Old Navy is Betches Style’s launch partner, and will advertise on the vertical through the end of the year.

Read more here.

How The New York Times is betting on a new family plan to grow its digital subscriber base and revenue

• The New York Times will begin offering a family subscription on Monday, allowing up to four people (they can be friends, too) to join one plan to get access to news and non-news products.
• The new tier is focused on the Times’ core subscription strategy: reaching new subscribers, improving retention, and increasing subscription revenue by getting more people to sign up for its subscription bundles, Ben Cotton, NYT’s head of subscriber growth, told Digiday.

Read more here.

Transparency is fueling a surge in creators’ sponsorship rates

• Sponsorship rates are on the rise in 2025, and creators say a newfound culture of pay transparency is helping fuel the jump.
• Creators’ sponsorship rates have climbed, and creators told Digiday that this has been driven in part by a new wave of transparency, with creators openly comparing sponsorship deals.

Read more here.

LGBTQ+ sports site Outsports grows revenue and audience by over 50% under new ownership

• Many LGBTQ+ publishers saw a slowdown in ad spend this year, but one publisher is emerging as an outlier – thanks to new ownership, more sales resources and its focus on sports coverage.
• Vox Media sold Outsports, which covers LGBTQ+ athletes, to Q.Digital last March. Since then, Outsports has grown revenue by about 50% year over year, and unique visitors are up over 60%.

Read more here.

What we’re reading

French publishers give AI revenue directly to journalists

French publishers like Le Monde have begun redistributing a share (as much as a 25% cut) of their AI licensing revenue directly to unionized journalists, Nieman Lab reported. But adoption of a similar model is unlikely here in the U.S.

Lachlan Murdoch winning control of the Fox and News Corp media empire could mean more dealmaking

Rupert Murdoch’s eldest son Lachlan secured control of the Fox and News Corp media empire, and with the succession battle in the rearview, analysts say this could spell a new era of M&A for the media empire, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Conde Nast still on the hook for online tracking lawsuit

A California federal judge denied Conde Nast’s attempt to throw out a class action claiming that the company installs third-party online trackers to collect user data like browser activity to target ads, Law360 reported.

The New York Times is shutting down its audio app

The New York Times will shut down its standalone audio app in early October and will integrate audio and video content directly into its main news app, Adweek reported. It’s part of an effort to streamline the user experience and consolidate its offerings within one flagship platform.

Reach lays off 300 people

The owner of the Daily Mirror and Daily Express will cut over 300 jobs as it pivots to video and plans to share more content across its titles, as part of a large reorganization, according to the BBC.