Pixalate’s CTV STI 2.0 rates sellers by arbitrage risk and invalid traffic (ad fraud) risk across Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV and Samsung TV in the United States; Google AdExchange, Magnite, OpenX, Xandr Monetize, Sharethrough among leaders
LONDON, Oct. 29, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Pixalate, an ad fraud and privacy compliance platform, today released the Q3 2026 Connected TV (CTV) Seller Trust Index (STI) 2.0 rankings. The CTV STI 2.0 ranks 60+ open programmatic CTV ad sellers across Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Samsung TV, and LG Smart TV in the United States. The index is free, public, and updated quarterly.
For each seller, the model measures:
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What Sellers Claim: How many publishers selling ads list the seller as DIRECT in their app-ads.txt file, as detected by Pixalate
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Verification of Seller Claims: The scale and ratio of a seller’s impressions that actually flowed through an authorized-direct path, per Pixalate’s SupplyChain Object (SCO) analysis
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Seller Arbitrage Risk: Independent Pixalate risk rating for selling >50% of inventory as a reseller, according to Pixalate’s SCO analysis
Arbitrage Trends in CTV (Q3 2026)
In CTV, 0.8% of ranked U.S. inventory was resold rather than sold publisher-direct in Q3 2026, roughly level with Q2 (0.7%), down from 4.1% in Q1, and still by far the lowest of any channel (web: 21.4%; mobile: 16.4%).
The share of ranked seller listings that are primarily arbitrageurs rose to 7 of 118 (about 6%), up from 2 of 195 (about 1%) in Q2 but below the 8% recorded in Q1. Samsung TV had the highest share (3 of 14 ranked sellers in Q3). No ranked seller on LG Smart TV resold more than half of its measured inventory.
Q3 2026 CTV Seller Trust Index 2.0: Top Sellers in United States
The following tables show the top-ranked sellers in the United States based on CTV Seller Trust Index scores for Q3 2026. Full rankings…