The pursuit of a more transparent and efficient digital advertising ecosystem is a shared goal and Jeff Green’s recent contribution correctly identifies the need for continued evolution. However, his vision of a streamlined future, defined primarily by buy-side interests, dismisses the strategic and practical realities of publishing and threatens the very openness he claims to champion. Transparency should not come at the cost of competition, nor should it serve as a Trojan horse for self-interest that undermines publishers.
The narrative portraying the supply side as "obfuscators and duplicators" is a convenient, but deeply flawed and hypocritical, oversimplification. Supply-side companies are, in fact, value-added resellers and strategic partners. Publishers engage multiple partners not to create complexity, but to drive competition, access specialized technology, and maximize revenue for quality content creation. These partners are essential channels for distribution and value creation. Eliminating them benefits the demand side (We note that The Trade Desk is explicitly named for a buy-side function) and overlooks the fact that supply-side partners exist partly due to demand-side inefficiencies.
Duplication, for instance, exists because of structural constraints in how bidders are designed. This fact is structural and not obvious unless you have a certain amount of experience working across DSPs. Regardless, in almost all cases, duplicative ad requests lead to higher revenue for publishers. Given The Trade Desk’s mission as a demand platform, it’s easy to see how less duplication would benefit them by making inventory cheaper for their advertisers. This holds true for both premium and less high-quality inventory; it is a fact that publishers earn more with a certain amount of duplication.
Regarding obfuscation: The Trade Desk’s log files are, by design, obfuscated. For example, they provide only the domain where an ad was served, not the specific URL. Actors in the ecosystem make choices about what information to share for their own benefit and what the market will bear. Just ask Nielsen. Obfuscation, in itself, is not problematic. It becomes a problem only when someone changes your access to information and impacts your business model.
Prebid.org’s removal of the TID is an example where one person’s obfuscation is another person’s protection of revenue: Prebid’s decision to remove the TID was not unilateral; it was made by their product committee, which includes thoughtful publishers who believed the buy side was exploiting the transparency offered by TID. In essence, The Trade Desk was part of the problem. As part of the change to the TID, they, prebid.org, expects that revenue was going to increase as part of preventing DSPs from identifying duplicative inventory.
From a publisher's perspective, value is not merely the shortest path from A to B. Value is the incremental revenue unlocked by a partner with unique access to niche demand. It’s the advanced yield management provided by a technology platform that outperforms a publisher’s internal stack. It's the operational lift of having a trusted team manage monetization, allowing the publisher to focus on their core product: content. It's the ability to add unique data or algorithms to the decisioning process. To ignore these contributions is to fundamentally misunderstand the economics of modern publishing.
We suggest reframing the discussion. This is not about cleaning up a messy supply chain; it's about preserving a publisher's right to manage their own distribution and business strategy and to optimize their revenue. Denying publishers the ability to work with their chosen partners isn’t optimization—it’s an attempt by the buy-side to impose its will, limit competition for its ad spend, and commoditize publisher inventory for its own gain.
Herein lies part of the hypocrisy. Initiatives framed as altruistic services to "clean up" the industry are, in reality, self-serving mechanisms for consolidating market control and increasing available margin for Jeff’s platforms to increase (or maintain) their take rates. When a demand-side platform dictates which supply paths are legitimate, it ceases to be a neutral partner and becomes a gatekeeper and a rent seeker. Jeff is, foremost, a capitalist. The ultimate beneficiary is not the publisher or the open internet, but the platform’s own bottom line. This isn't a vision for an open, collaborative future; it’s a blueprint for a walled garden, under the cover of supporting the open internet, where the buy-side sets the rules.
Progress requires a more balanced approach. More performant supply paths should be a collaborative effort that respects the strategic choices of publishers, not pushed from a self-interested demand side. Let’s work together to build a transparent and efficient future, but let's do it in a way that empowers publishers, not disenfranchises or punishes them. The health of the open internet depends on every part of the ecosystem being able to get paid for the value they create.