Why bother with resold inventory when you can buy direct?
Many CTV buyers have been asking themselves that exact question for years as they’ve watched DSPs and SSPs push intermediaries – and especially resellers – out of the supply chain in favor of direct publisher integrations.
The Trade Desk, which already had a strict no-resellers policy in place for its TV and video inventory, updated its policies in August to further define all supply-side platforms as resellers, too. CTV startup Vibe.co made a similar move in November by cutting out all supply-side resellers, and Cadent announced a week ago that all the CTV supply paths in its SSP product are now direct.
Sell-side platforms have mostly either applauded or downplayed the shift. To hear them tell it, weeding out resold inventory is a clear win-win: cleaner pipes, less fraud and more transparency.
But that neat narrative falls apart for smaller independent CTV publishers that depend on resellers and other intermediaries to monetize what little inventory they actually control. For them, these crackdowns look less like a cleanup and more like yet another revenue squeeze.
Small publishers under pressure
The situation, however, is nuanced. Reselling has become a necessary evil for CTV publishers.
Most independent CTV publishers distribute their content through third-party free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) services, like The Roku Channel (aff), Samsung TV+, Paramount-Skydance-owned Pluto TV or Xumo, a joint venture between Comcast and Charter Communications.
Publishers typically negotiate with these services based on inventory shares, where distributors control a percentage of a publisher’s inventory (usually around 50%) to sell ads against.
But these deals pit publishers against their own content, said Scott Boos, chief revenue officer of Pursuit Media LLC, which distributes content related to hunting, fishing, shooting and other outdoor activities…