More than 80% of programmatic dollars will be transacted via direct and private marketplace deals in 2025, according to eMarketer. This dramatic shift toward direct supply paths isn’t happening by accident. In fact, it’s a strategic response to a multitude of market pressures and evolving brand safety requirements that have buyers prioritizing premium supply over scale at any cost.

The scale paradox: Bigger isn’t better

If premium publisher inventory is finite, why are some SSPs generating over 10x the typical rate of daily bid requests? 

The numbers reveal a telling contradiction. The top five SSPs share access to 80% of inventory, with any two top-tier SSPs combined providing 90% of existing supply coverage. This overlap raises a critical question: if we’re all accessing the same premium inventory pool, where are these massive request volumes actually originating?

What’s driving inflated bid volumes

The answer lies in three problematic practices that inflate bid request volumes without adding value, harm buyer campaigns, and erode trust and transparency in the programmatic ecosystem:

1. Intentional request duplication: Multiple SSPs and ad servers are providing intentional tooling or backend optimization that send identical bid requests for the same exact users and ad placements, clogging DSP systems and limiting additional unique bids from reaching auctions. This creates artificial volume that falsely inflates a sense of scale, wastes computational resources (while decreasing auction efficiency), and harms buyers who overpay for impressions while reducing reach and performance.
   
   
2. Multi-hop reselling: Multiple intermediary layers between publishers and buyers create duplicate bid requests as the same inventory gets resold through various supply chains. Each reseller adds margin while contributing no additional value, and reduces the buyer’s working media budget with each additional hop in the supply-chain.
   
   
3. Made-for-advertising (MFA) content: Low-quality sites designed solely to generate ad revenue flood the ecosystem with inventory that delivers poor user experiences and minimal brand value. These sites artificially inflate available impressions, offer little to no genuine engagement opportunity, and drive low value or sometimes fraudulent conversions.
   

Do you often find yourself paying for access to massive volumes of inventory that don’t align with your campaign objectives or brand requirements? The proliferation of low-quality sites, bot traffic, and irrelevant placements has made inventory volume a poor proxy for platform value.

This evolution reflects a broader realization that forward-thinking buyers understand: not all supply is created equal, and quality of supply matters more than ever.

Six criteria for selecting an SSP and curation platform in 2025

To navigate this quality-first landscape effectively, buyers need a clear framework for assessing high-value SSP and curation partners. Focusing on these six criteria is the key to maximizing your investments.

1. Premium, direct publisher coverage: Some SSPs inflate inventory counts with low-quality sites, MFA content, and bot traffic that waste buyer budgets. OpenX takes a different approach, focusing on direct, high-quality supply with 200,000+ premium publisher integrations and processing over 500 billion daily requests under strict quality standards. This includes 100% direct sourcing for our CTV offering, TV by OpenX, and the elimination of all inbound traffic with more than two hops across our entire exchange.
   
   
2. Bid request integrity: Your media investments deserve quality assurance at the bid level. Premium supply access should include built-in safeguards that protect buyer investments and maximize campaign performance. Ensure your SSP partner is maintaining rigorous standards and deploying advanced tooling to eliminate multi-hop reselling and intentional request duplication, ensuring ad spend flows to genuine, high-value unique inventory opportunities, while maximizing your working media and not overpaying for impressions.
   
   
3. MFA and inventory quality tools: MFA sites drain budgets despite industry awareness, since most SSPs lack robust quality controls. OpenX excludes MFA domains by default, filters 20 billion daily requests, and maintains 235,000+ lifetime blocked domains — earning a Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) platinum certification for anti-fraud, inventory quality, transparency, and anti-malware.
   
   
4. Curation: Most platforms confuse basic curation with supply-side targeting. (Struggling with these definitions? We can help.) At OpenX, we enhance curation by using AI to automatically filter out low-quality or risky content. We also enable advanced supply-side targeting powered by our proprietary data and identity graph built with over 80 direct data and identity partners, as well as over 250 additional third-party data providers through LiveRamp.
   
   
5. Data and identity: Global privacy laws have left most SSPs with limited, outdated identity solutions that reduce audience reach. In contrast, OpenX supports advanced data targeting across cookies, MAIDs, authenticated IDs, IP addresses, and more, enabling seamless interoperability for first- and third-party data.
   
   
6.  Responsibility: Fraud prevention is only one part of the many responsibilities SSPs have to foster a healthy ecosystem. OpenX was one of the first 10 companies to earn the TAG “Certified for Transparency” Seal for setting industry best practices around supply chain transparency, while working to proliferate safe environments for brands and consumers across the open web.

How OpenX delivers on quality standards

These criteria matter so much because they directly impact campaign performance. Buyers need better supply transparency and control to get higher engagement through quality inventory, improved auction efficiency, and clear economic benefits via supply path integrity. In short, they translate to better outcomes for clients.

A foundation of best practices in supply quality supports OpenXSelect, our next-generation curation and supply-side targeting platform. Designed to bring buyers closer to supply, the platform enables granular control of inventory quality, targeting at scale using a wide range of data — including audience, behavioral, attention, and sustainability — and optimized performance through a streamlined, intuitive interface.   

The future of programmatic media belongs to buyers who demand quality supply over artificial scale and utilize the tools to take granular control of their investments. OpenX is building that future, today.

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Ready to experience the difference that premium supply can make for your campaigns? Learn more about OpenXSelect and discover how advanced curation and supply-side targeting can transform your programmatic strategy.