Open a demand-side platform in 2026 and the buy you are about to make has almost certainly been arranged in advance by someone else. Jounce Media analyzed 1.5 billion bid requests across 44 ad exchanges and found that only 18.6 percent were pure open auction. Multi-seller curated deals made up 73 percent. The average bid request now carries 3.5 different deal IDs. That is the quiet headline of the last two years: the open exchange, the thing most people picture when they hear the word programmatic, is no longer how programmatic mostly works.
The model that replaced it is called curation. Almost nobody chose it deliberately. It arrived through opt-ins buried in vendor settings, through agency supply lists, through an SSP toggle a publisher never saw. Worth understanding what it is before deciding how you feel about it.
What curation actually is
A curator assembles a package. The curator is usually a supply-side platform or a data specialist, sometimes an agency, occasionally a publisher. The package is a pre-vetted bundle of inventory, often pulled from many publishers at once, with a data layer attached and quality controls already applied. Brand safety screening, fraud filtering, viewability thresholds, an audience segment, a contextual signal: the filtering happens before the inventory reaches the buyer. The German trade body BVDW, in a February 2026 whitepaper written to pin the term down, defined curation as the targeted selection, combination and enrichment of media inventory and data signals into packages aligned to a specific objective.
The buyer activates that package through their own DSP. They do not switch tools, log into the curator's interface, or buy on a separate platform. The curated deal arrives as a deal ID, a string the buyer drops into the DSP exactly as they would any other deal. From the trading desk it looks like one more line item. Underneath, it is a pre-built marketplace someone else stocked and priced.
That last point is the whole design. Curation moves the inventory decision earlier, to before the auction. Instead of a buyer bidding into the open exchange and using DSP-side filters to throw out the junk after the fact, the curator does the vetting first, and the DSP only ever sees inventory that already cleared the bar. AdTech Explained frames it as accuracy and value over volume.
The two things it is not
Curation gets confused with the open exchange on one side and the old private marketplace on the other. It is neither.
The open exchange is the wide-open auction. Any buyer, any seller, real-time bidding on a single impression, starting from a floor price, highest bid wins. Its strength is reach: nearly everything is for sale through it. Its weakness is that there is no quality filter at all. The buyer inherits the full mess, made-for-advertising sites, bot traffic, unviewable placements, and has to police it themselves with verification vendors and exclusion lists. The ANA's Q2 2025 transparency benchmark put roughly 26.8 billion dollars of global programmatic value in the waste column each year. A separate ANA study found that only about 36 cents of every dollar entering a DSP reaches the end consumer, the rest lost to a cost waterfall of tech fees and low-value inventory. The open exchange is where most of that leakage lives.
The private marketplace, the PMP in its original sense, is the opposite shape. One publisher, or a small group, offers a defined pool of premium inventory to a short list of invited buyers at agreed terms, through a deal ID. It is direct, it is high quality, and it is narrow and manual. Each deal is a relationship someone negotiated. PMPs do not scale to the breadth a media plan needs, which is exactly why they stayed a minority tactic for years.
Curation sits between the two and borrows from both. It uses the deal ID plumbing of the PMP, so it is a controlled buy with terms set in advance. But the curator pulls inventory across many publishers and exchanges at once, so it reaches open-exchange scale. A PMP is one publisher's shelf. A curated deal is a shelf someone stocked from the whole store. Jounce's numbers make the distinction concrete: single-seller deals, the traditional PMP, were 8.7 percent of bidding opportunities. Multi-seller curated deals were 73 percent.
Why it rose now
Curation is not new technology. The deal ID has existed for over a decade. What changed is that two pressures arrived at the same time and curation answered both.
The first is supply path optimization. SPO is the buyer-side discipline of cutting redundant, low-quality routes to an impression, because the same ad slot is usually for sale through a dozen paths and a buyer who bids on all of them pays to compete against itself. Curation sits naturally on top of that work. A curated deal is, in effect, a pre-optimized supply path. The curator has already chosen which exchanges and which sellers are worth including. Lotame describes curation as the automated, machine-learning version of SPO, analyzing supply-side signals a DSP cannot see and packaging the result. A buyer running SPO by hand is doing the curator's job manually. Many decided to let the curator do it. (For the groundwork, see supply path optimization.)
The second is signal loss. The industry spent years preparing for a cookieless web, and Google then cancelled third-party cookie deprecation in April 2025. But the cookie reprieve did not undo the real decay from Safari, Firefox, app tracking limits and regulation. Curation gave the industry a place to apply data without depending on the cookie. Because the curator assembles the package on the sell side, first-party and third-party segments can be attached to inventory there, before the impression is ever auctioned. Experian, itself a curation vendor, argues the shift happened because scale alone stopped translating into performance once identity fragmented. Curation became the layer where data and inventory get matched.
Add the quality crisis underneath both. With made-for-advertising sites still draining hundreds of millions a quarter and bot traffic a large share of the open web, a pre-vetted package is simply less work than policing the exchange impression by impression. That is the pitch: efficiency, quality, less waste, and a data layer, all delivered as a deal ID. Experian cites advertiser data-cost savings of 36 to 81 percent against uncurated open-exchange buying. Treat vendor figures with care, but the direction is clear enough that SSPs including Index Exchange, Magnite and OpenX have built curation tools straight into their platforms, and PubMatic reported its Connect curation and data business growing more than 100 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2025.
The honest concerns
Curation is sold as the cure for programmatic's opacity problem. It is at least as accurate to say it relocates the opacity.
Start with the fee. Curation adds an intermediary, and the intermediary charges. The buyer often cannot see how much. Jounce's analysis of curation pricing found four models: roughly half of curated deal IDs carry no fee beyond the standard exchange take, about 34 percent apply a margin-based markup with a median 14 percent take rate, around 10 percent charge a fixed CPM with a median of 48 cents, and about 7 percent use static pricing that declares the same floor regardless of the impression, where Jounce found margins frequently above 50 percent. The buyer dropping a deal ID into a DSP usually sees none of this. As Mike Wolk of Goodway Group put it in AdExchanger, curation fees get baked into the commercial terms rather than broken out as a line item, which can create the illusion of cost savings while a buyer counts curator margin as working media.
There is a sharp counterargument. PubMatic CEO Rajeev Goel argues that whatever fee a curator takes is the fair value of the data, that SSP-applied fees often undercut DSP data fees, and that the price a buyer pays is declared in the SSP when the deal is set up. There is also a more deflating version. Scott Messer, founder of publisher consultancy Messer Media, told AdExchanger that sell-side curation fees are the same old ad-tech tax relocated within the chain: the net to the publisher is roughly the same, it is all middle vendors taking their cut. Curation, on that read, did not remove a layer. It renamed one. (On where the money goes, see the ad-tech tax.)
Then there is what is actually inside the package. A curated deal is not a quality guarantee. Composition can shift week to week, even hour to hour, and the buyer who does not pull detailed placement reports will not notice. AdExchanger's content studio was blunt: curation often moves opacity from one layer to another, and in too many cases means little more than putting filters in place. Publishers have their own complaint. Amanda Gomez, SVP of revenue operations at The New York Post, told AdExchanger that publishers get automatically opted into curated deals without knowing, sometimes learning only when a revenue-share email arrives after the fact, with limited control over the floors that protect their premium inventory.
And the word itself is slipping. At IAB Europe's Virtual Programmatic Day in July 2025, executives openly clashed over whether curation was genuine innovation or rebranded PMP buying, with one Comcast leader noting streamers had been curating all along. When a label means a verified, data-rich, fraud-screened package in one deal and a thin filter with a markup in the next, the label has stopped doing useful work. The honest buyer test is whether the curator will state exactly what is inside, what the fee is, and where it sits.
Where it is heading
Curation is converging with the two forces around it: supply path optimization and the agentic buying layer.
The SPO merge is nearly complete. Agencies have started pushing curation upstream, deciding inventory eligibility before the auction rather than filtering after it. Digiday reported that around 80 percent of agency Butler/Till's spend runs through deals, more of them assembled dynamically as campaigns run, with the agency itself controlling which impressions enter the bidstream. That is curation and SPO becoming the same activity, owned by the buyer.
The agentic layer is the next turn. The Ad Context Protocol, the open standard for AI agents in advertising built on Anthropic's Model Context Protocol, includes a dedicated curation module among its first components. Amazon's DSP shipped automatic deal selection in April 2026, a feature that picks streaming TV deals on its own and swaps them in and out by performance during a campaign without anyone touching the line item. A curated deal is a clean unit for an agent to handle: a pre-vetted, machine-readable package an autonomous buyer can evaluate and trade. Multilocal's Fern Potter predicted curation becoming the connective tissue of media buying, with the gains coming from pairing human judgment with agentic systems rather than choosing one.
That trajectory points at a real risk. The original case for SPO and curation was transparency. An agentic buying layer running on top of opaque curated deals could rebuild the exact obfuscation the industry spent years dismantling, with software hiding fees and inventory composition faster than a human could audit them. The promise and the failure mode are the same machinery.
For a media-buying decision-maker, the practical stance is steady. Curation is the default buy now, and for most plans that is fine. It cuts genuine waste and bolts on a data layer the cookie no longer provides. But default is not the same as trustworthy. Treat every curated deal as a thing to interrogate, not accept: ask what publishers are inside, demand the fee as a number, A/B test the deal against a plain comparable buy, and pull placement reports often enough to catch the composition drifting. Curation earns its fee when the curator will show its work. When it will not, you are paying the old tax under a new name.
Council summary
This post argues that programmatic curation has quietly become the default way media gets bought, with multi-seller curated deals now accounting for 73 percent of bidding opportunities, and that most buyers never made a deliberate choice to switch. Its real teaching work is the three-way distinction: curation borrows the deal ID plumbing of the private marketplace but pulls inventory at open-exchange scale, so it is neither the wide-open auction nor the old one-publisher PMP. The strongest section is the honest accounting of fees, where the post sets a vendor's defense of curation pricing against the publisher-side view that it is the same ad-tech tax wearing a new name, and declines to pretend the question is settled. The takeaway for a media-buying decision-maker is not to avoid curation, which would be impractical, but to treat every curated deal as something to interrogate: name the publishers inside it, get the fee as a number, test it against a plain comparable buy, and watch the composition drift. Curation earns its place only when the curator will show its work.
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