Probe Finds Middlemen Siphon off Half of Online Advertising Spend
https://www.theregister.co.ukA study of the UK online advertising market, conducted by global accounting firm PwC, has found that publishers get just half of what advertisers spend, with the other half siphoned off by ad-supply chain intermediaries.
The PwC study, conducted at the behest of the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA), represents an attempt to understand approximately £2bn UK programmatic ad market and its supply chain. The ISBA has made the executive summary [PDF] available but only offers the full report to members. PwC’s finding that publishers received just 51 per cent on the dollar, or British pound in this case.
PwC’s team of data scientists, data engineers and ad-tech specialists collected data from the study participants: 15 advertisers, 12 agencies, five DSPs, six SSPs and 12 publishers, representing approximately £0.1bn of UK programmatic ad spend and nearly two-thirds of AOP (premium publisher) digital ad revenues.
Data collection ran from 1 January 2020 to 20 March 2020. From 267 million impressions served from study advertisers to study publishers, 31 million (12%) were successfully matched. The rest could not be mapped due to low data quality, which reinforces the critical conclusions from this study.