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Store curation captured the imagination of the advertising industry last year. But curatorial interview has already taken on a more pessimistic tone on the publisher’s side in 2025.
Critics say curation is nothing new. DSP data marketplaces have long enabled curated offers. Even on the sell side, SSPs have been managing private marketplaces (PMPs) for years. And the IAB Tech Lab developed a framework built on top of it Seller Defined Audience (SDA) a specification that will allow publishers to manage their own audiences in 2022.
But SDA failed to capture on the free market. And other management approaches are primarily driven by ad tech platforms, not publishers. Meanwhile, although publishers generate revenue from curated deals, some are suspicious should see further gradual growthgiven all the hype.
Now, there’s a new narrative around curation where publishers feel they’ve missed another opportunity to leverage how their first-party data is used to build audiences. And they fear that the opportunity – and the resulting income – has instead been taken by middlemen.
In other words, the same old ad tech story.
Publishers lose curation
“Most publishers I’ve talked to don’t see any upside from curation,” Ryan Pauley, president of revenue and growth at Vox Media, told AdExchanger.. Although the company owns an SSP and a first-party data platform — the technology layers best positioned to benefit from the curation craze — Vox Media’s lack of curation revenue also affects Vox Media.
“If anyone is going to see curation take off, it’s a company like Vox Media,” Pauley said. “And if that’s not happening, I don’t know where that value goes — except where it always goes: to the middlemen.”
In that sense, curation is “just a marketing ploy to get advertisers to spend within programmatic ad technology,” Pauley said, and to prevent ad budgets from being diverted to direct deals with publishers.
Indeed, publishers are following earlier data management platforms (DMPs) they renamed themselves Curation Specialists and fattening on demand driven by advertisers flocking to curation shops, said Justin Wohl, former CRO of Snopes and TV Tropes, who joined publisher tech platform Aditude in December.
“This indicates to me as a publisher that there was a large amount of opportunity that I wasn’t aware of,” Wohl told AdExchanger just before jumping into Aditude.
In 2025, publishers need to rethink how they work with curation partners, Wohl said.
Instead of multiple partners putting code on their sites and creating audience graphs using their first-party data, publishers should do the graphs themselves — or at least let partners pay for access to that data, he said.
“If you’re able to make any inference about an audience member because of cookies that I provided, or because of a user agent or an IP address of my user,” Wohl said, “then as a publisher, I should take the most credit for that because it originated with me .”
Who do advertisers trust?
While the data that drives curation comes from the publisher, advertisers seem to trust how ad tech vendors package audiences much more than how publishers do it themselves.
“The whole reason SDA didn’t go ahead was because we agreed that publishers couldn’t be trusted and that a seller-defined audience wouldn’t be accurate or credible enough for a buyer to accept,” Wohl said.
IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur echoed that sentiment when he said announced last month that Tech Lab is rebranding SDA as “Curated Audiences” – pointing to the “vendor-defined” nomenclature as a hindrance to buyers who wanted to control how audiences are formed rather than trust vendors.
Meanwhile, the buy side appears to be putting much more faith in the technology vendors that dominate the curation market.
One reason for this confidence is that SSPs and DMPs can offer greater scale across multiple publishers, said publisher monetization consultant Scott Messer. But it’s also because these technology vendors aggressively market themselves through industry events and thought leadership, he said.
SSPs are also better positioned to build relationships with DSPs and agencies than individual publishers, Wohl said, meaning buyers are more inclined to trust the audience that SSP has built.
DMPs and SSPs also build trust among buyers by selling publisher inventory — but with the DMP or SSP brand attached, Wohl added. And if these audiences succeed, the technology vendor, not the publisher, gets the reputation boost.
For example, DMPs and SSPs can package inventory from multiple sports publishers and sell it as their own curated audience for sports enthusiasts, rather than offering buyers on individual publisher domains.
However, if curated packages are sold under the DMP or SSP name rather than the publisher name, sometimes the publisher price is ignored, Wohl said. This results in publishers’ premium inventory being bundled alongside less valuable sites and sold at sub-premium prices, he said.
So premium pubs may still be moving inventory through curated deals, but according to Wohl, they’re likely getting lower CPMs than they would if buyers were buying that inventory directly.
Additionally, publishers lack transparency about how much revenue their curation partners collect, Wohl said. So pubs have no idea how much money they are leaving on the table – apart from what they can derive from DMP and SSP growth.
Curation is powered by data
There is clearly some bitterness on the part of the publisher about curation. But before publishers get too hung up on the negatives, there are a few important points to keep in mind.
First, ad tech vendors have an advantage over publishers when it comes to providing measurement and attribution for programmatic channels, Vox Media’s Pauley said.
And while it’s true that publishers could curate audiences themselves, Messer said, the current curation craze is fueled by data-driven inventory selection. And most publishers are not as sophisticated as DMPs and SSPs when it comes to understanding audience data or selling it to advertisers, he added.
Publishers also shouldn’t overemphasize CPM differences for select offers, Messer said.
“If a curated trade through your SSP is billed for $1, but your open auction average is $2, that’s not necessarily a bad thing,” he said. “It just means that SSP found some stock that no one else wanted to buy, but they enriched it with data and [other] inventory and got someone to buy it.’
Additionally, curation currently represents only a single-digit percentage of most publishers’ SSP demand, Messer said. So publishers still have a chance to negotiate fairer terms with their technology partners as the sell-side curation business matures.
However, curatorial partners should be more proactive in enforcing publisher minimum prices, Messer said. In this way, it ensures not only that publishers receive fair market value for their inventory, but that curators receive fair value for processing the data.
And finally, the curation hype is good for publishers because “PMPs are cool again,” he said. “From 2018 to 2024, it was difficult to sell deal IDs as buyers relied more on the open auction and their sellers’ DSP suite. This shift [to sell-side curation] brought PMP back.”