Publishers see double-digit growth from The Trade Desk’s OpenPath, but volatility remains

Several publishers said that The Trade Desk is temporarily allowing duplicate bids on those integrating with OpenAds, as a sweetener to ease onboarding. One publisher said it plans to accelerate integration with OpenAds, to capitalize on this “likely temporary window.”

It’s a small, but likely temporary irony. In theory, OpenAds is what enables the detection and control of duplication. At a time when publishers are grappling with dwindling referral traffic, AI scraping, and the pressure to evolve business models for the generative AI era, having more bids leading to higher CPMs, even if temporary, is an update they’re likely happy to tolerate. 

“We’re in the process of launching OpenAds because I think there is benefit in being a first adopter, meaning they are allowing duplicate bids to OpenPath and OpenAds for now, which means you get multiple opportunities to the Trade Desk’s demand,” said the same publisher. 

Mike O’Sullivan, vp of product management for The Trade Desk said while he hadn’t said he’d tolerate bid duplications per se, there is a “spectrum” and not all duplication is equal.

While “horizontal” duplication – where the same impression appears across multiple supply paths – is often seen as problematic, it can reflect real differences in how inventory is packaged, priced or enriched with data, he noted. By contrast, “vertical” duplication, where certain paths flood the DSP with far higher volumes of bid requests, is the more significant inefficiency, per O’Sullivan. Much of what appears to be duplication is simply a byproduct of how publishers structure inventory, compounded by limitations in standards like OpenRTB, he added. 

An exec who worked at a company that was one of the first wave of publishers that integrated OpenAds said they were seeing success. “We did see double-digit growth in bid rate,” a publishing exec said at the Digiday Publishing Summit in a closed-down town hall session. “We just recently opened it up to video as well. So we’re waiting to see how that performs.”

O’Sullivan declined to reveal how many publishers had integrated with OpenAds to date. 

Several smaller and mid-size publishers Digiday spoke to said that OpenPath has helped them to slim down resellers and generally clean up their supply path. Ed Arrandale, vp of revenue and operations at WeatherBug, said they were seeing double-digit revenue gains and higher CPMs on average in the past year, though this fluctuated seasonally. January 2026 was up 10 percent year over year, he said.

An exec at a major global publisher, who agreed to speak under the condition of anonymity to protect vendor relations, said that since using OpenPath it has seen a “material effect” on CPMs, with a double-digit rise in yields. It also exposed some of its other SSP partners as inefficient in the process, they said. “That direct connection that they talk about has paid dividends,” they said. Those results have enticed it to look at trialling OpenAds, to see whether there is a similar positive effect on cleaning up. 

Several publishers told Digiday they’ve seen a couple lows, though too. One publisher saw their spend on The Trade Desk drop by half in January, though they conceded that was largely self-inflicted, attributing it to video demand and site changes to ad density paired with a soft first quarter. Another said they’ve seen a sharp drop in the last month and no recovery as yet, but it’s hard to gain the data transparency needed to dig into why exactly that may have happened. They’ve felt frustrated that The Trade Desk hasn’t responded to them sooner, to help them understand what’s happening. “There has been a real lack of transparency from their [The Trade Desk’s] side,” they said.  

That same publisher exec who has seen a recent drop hasn’t seen any data that points to a change in spend from the agency holdcos. 

The current buy-side friction — notably the tensions between holding groups Publicis and Omnicom and The Trade Desk — reflects a push and pull over control over how budgets are allocated and routed. Naturally, it hasn’t gone unnoticed by publishers, who tend to be downstream beneficiaries (or casualties) of whatever happens upstream between agencies and DSPs.

A head of revenue operations at a lifestyle publisher – who traded anonymity for candor — said they weren’t seeing any impact from agencies pulling spend from OpenPath. Two other publishing execs told Digiday the same recently at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colo.

Whether the buy-side friction will force any changes downstream remains an open question. “We don’t know that publishers truly understand the relationship between the agency and the vendor, and the friction that exists and has existed has really bubbled up, but the publisher has really just looked at the dollar rather than the source,” said Matt Barash, chief commercial officer at Nova Studio. “So now they’re forced to re-evaluate and think differently, perhaps about where the dollar comes from.”

Perhaps there’s no such thing as true transparency – only varying shades of opacity. “The world is splitting into two camps: those who believe The Trade Desk is hiding things and those who believe The Trade Desk is showing everything.  Siding with the former feels more like an intolerance of transparency than an actual injustice caused by The Trade Desk,” added Scott Messer, principal at Messer Media.

PubDesk seen as an ‘olive branch’ to publishers

“We’ve seen a substantial spend increase via OpenPath [in the past year],” said a head of revenue operations at a lifestyle publication. It’s hard for me to say [what’s behind that] because I don’t truly understand how things get allocated with OpenPath.” They declined to share figures.

Spend through OpenPath has grown over the past year from relatively modest levels to now representing the majority of spend on The Trade Desk, said a different publisher who agreed to speak in exchange for anonymity. Figuring out the reasons behind certain revenue fluctuations from any DSP is super complicated for publishers to isolate.

“It’s really hard to know sometimes. Like, you’ve got the external force of Amazon — whose share of spending on our platform has skyrocketed in the last 18 months — so they’re bidding more and more, so if The Trade Desk is down sometimes, is that because Amazon is eating impressions that they would have wanted, or is it because The Trade Desk is doing something else, it’s hard to pull apart,” they said. 

Therein lies the rub. Many publishers say they’re still struggling to pinpoint what’s driving fluctuations in revenue and yields, lacking the transparency needed to adapt — which can in some cases leave them feeling like sitting ducks. That’s not a challenge that’s isolated to The Trade Desk, but more a reflection of the wider ecosystem. 

The Trade Desk’s O’Sullivan said The Trade Desk had been contacted by publishers who had seen sharp revenue fluctuations but said that’s it’s difficult to pinpoint the “Goldilocks zone” because it can’t open up all its decisioning logic and risk it being used to “goal seek” — aka exploit that information to game the system and optimize purely to hit the DSP’s decisioning thresholds.

Last October The Trade Desk released PubDesk (along with OpenAds) a dashboard designed to offer publishers insights into what signals buyer want so they can optimize for higher revenue. Publishers using PubDesk can see all the signals to “address anxiety,” as O’Sullivan put it: bid fill and win rate, along with bids placed, impressions, prices, ad spend. It also shows pacing data, including how bid rates, bid volume, and spend and pricing evolve day by day. Publishers can then compare that to what the average market rate is. 

Publishers have welcomed this tool and the additional transparency it provides, with one publisher describing it as an “olive branch” from The Trade Desk. They said they regularly use performance data to identify areas for improvement via PubDesk, and whenever they make changes they monitor key metrics, like the ratio of ads to content and the average number of ads actually seen, to assess whether those changes had a positive or negative impact. “It’s really valuable,” they said. 

But there are still gray areas the tool doesn’t make any clearer, so have no visibility into what has specifically caused any drops to OpenPath spend when they occur, noted one publisher

“It’s built for them to look, it’s not built to give me the full transparency,” said another publishing exec. 

O’Sullivan said that The Trade Desk is constantly tweaking PubDesk based on publisher feedback, incorporating new features on request. “We’re getting great feedback from publishers about what’s useful, what’s ambiguous, what’s a little confusing,” said O’Sullivan, who noted that a publisher had just requested that it include the names of each of the SSPs on the supply path.

Publishers’ complicated relationship with The Trade Desk 

Publishers are generally hesitant to speak about The Trade Desk, which echoes the careful, frenemy-style dynamic they’ve long had with Google. Most would rather keep quiet, for fear of jeopardizing a relationship with a major source of demand. Any complaints about The Trade Desk are said in whispers — if at all. 

Two publishers Digiday spoke to on condition of anonymity said that The Trade Desk had been known to be aggressive about warning spend will be cut if they felt the publishers were not in sync with their own recommendations. 

Others have described their relationship with the DSP as akin to fair-weather sailing. As one publisher, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, put it, “They’re great, until something goes wrong. “Right when I give them those probing, deep questions [about unforeseen revenue drops] that I would to any other partner who would give me full transparency. It’s all fine until that point, then a wall goes up.”

However, last fall, publishers noted a considerable, positive, change in The Trade Desk’s willingness to bend and more flexibly accommodate publishers’ wishes, which many attributed to the increased competition from competing DSPs, notably Amazon.

One publisher said that The Trade Desk has had to be aggressive in its stance with publishers occasionally to stamp out bad practices that the publishers themselves may be using to game the system.

They’re divisive among publishers. “They are going out of their way to help publishers,” Arrandale said. “It’s obvious that there’s a lot of time and effort to build up that relationship with the publishers. For us, at least for now, it’s paying off… and certainly, more transparency into what is going on in their marketplace.”

He said being on OpenPath meant having a direct contact at The Trade Desk, who could explain any drops they saw in spend and attribute it directly to a brand’s changes – information they wouldn’t get from SSPs before. “Having that contact at The Trade Desk has been really helpful to us. There used to be a black box before,” he said.

Others have found them a challenging partner, particularly over the last six months, which have been a test for The Trade Desk, with its stock under pressure and agency holding groups growing more vocal about billing transparency. “The tone The Trade Desk has taken lately has been more demanding than partnership-like,” said another publishing exec who agreed to speak under the condition of anonymity. “So it feels like ‘if you don’t do this, then you don’t get revenue from us.’ But they’re asking for more than I think they should,” said the same exec. 

One bugbear: terms in a lot of the contracts prevent publishers from sharing any of their log-level data with, or API access to, other partners, like for example, Adomik (a platform used by publishers to collect and organize their revenue data from their SSPs and ad servers). “That means when we want a full picture, you still can’t get it. I think that’s part of the issue, they take a lot of data from us, but are not like, reciprocal with that,” said one publishing exec.