CTV is having a moment—but for media owners, the narrative isn't lining up with reality.
The streaming audience keeps growing. Nearly three in four advertisers plan to increase CTV spend this year. Recent moves like Viant's acquisition of TVision and Publicis' $2.2B agreement to acquire LiveRamp show where the buy side is putting its money: signal quality and identity infrastructure. The category is expected to hit $46 billion by 2028 — with half of all CTV/OTT advertising purchased programmatically.
And yet, revenue for publishers keeps lagging. Fill rates shift without a clear cause. CPMs stay flat or soften. Reporting doesn’t explain it, and many assume the problem is on the demand side, when it usually isn't.
If that pattern sounds familiar, you're not imagining it. In a recent EX.CO survey of CTV media owners, nearly 80% said they believe their current setup is leaving revenue on the table.
That distance — between what CTV inventory is worth and what media owners are actually realizing — has a name. We call it the yield gap, and it's the topic of our newest industry guide.
Three reasons the CTV yield gap persists
The yield gap isn't a demand problem, even though it can look like one. It's a structural mismatch between how CTV inventory is bought today and the infrastructure used to sell it.
When we asked CTV media owners to name the biggest limiter on their revenue growth, three issues rose to the top: low bid density, floor pricing challenges, and inefficient auctions.
Most legacy pipes were retrofitted from display: designed for banner auctions, not ad pods; with decisioning for single impressions, not sequential slots; and built for a world where signal loss was an inconvenience, not a CPM problem.
As CTV grew, new SSP integrations got layered on top — with little visibility into what’s actually happening at the impression level. These structural issues don’t show up in standard reporting:
- Signal degradation. Content, audience, and pod-level signals routinely get stripped or dropped as bid requests move through the supply chain. When buyers can't see what they're bidding on, they bid less — and the CPM impact is bigger than you’d think.
- Static floor pricing. CTV inventory value changes by daypart, content type, device, and live market conditions. Most floors are set manually and revisited quarterly. The mismatch leaves money on the table in strong weeks and suppresses fill in soft ones.
- Legacy auction architecture. Since most CTV programmatic stacks were retrofitted from display, they evaluate each ad slot in isolation. CTV pods don't work that way, and the mismatch shows up as lower CPMs, partial fill, and timeouts.
Why adding more SSPs won’t fix monetization
For years, the default playbook for closing the CTV yield gap was simple: add more demand partners. More SSPs, more integrations, more bidders. More competition to lift CPMs.
That strategy has hit diminishing returns. The average CTV platform now authorizes around 30 SSPs to sell its inventory — roughly double a year ago. But more partners have produced more reselling, not more revenue. And reseller economics inflate what buyers pay without additional dollars flowing back to publishers.
Meanwhile, the buy side is moving in the opposite direction. Major DSPs and agencies are actively consolidating spend onto fewer, more direct supply paths. The more SSP integrations a publisher adds, the noisier they look to the buyers running supply path optimization — and the less spend moves their way.
The answer isn't more demand — it's smarter infrastructure
The good news in all of this? The yield gap is mostly a technology problem, which means it's solvable — and not by rebuilding from scratch.
When we asked CTV media owners to name the biggest barrier to changing or upgrading their stack, the answer wasn't switching costs or ROI uncertainty. It was internal resource and engineering constraints.
What's changed in the past 12 months is the kind of infrastructure available to the majority of mid-tier CTV media owners — operators with real programmatic complexity but without the engineering bench that the major streamers can throw at it. ML-driven decisioning that used to require a dedicated yield engineering team is now within reach as a layer that works alongside the SSPs and ad server you already have. Smarter auctions, not more partners.
It's also arriving just in time. The Trade Desk's recent acquisition of Sincera — a company built around signal quality intelligence — and Pinterest's acquisition of tvScientific both prove the buy side is investing in performance-driven CTV. Agentic AI buying systems will only accelerate the consolidation already seen in recent acquisitions, raising the cost of an unoptimized stack.
The media owners who close their yield gap in the next 12 months will capture a disproportionate share of this consolidating spend. The ones who don't may find themselves continuing to lose buyer share, even if their content and audience are stronger.
Stop leaving CTV revenue on the table
Our new guide, Closing the CTV Yield Gap, walks through the key fixes for media owners:
- Survey insights on CTV owners’ top monetization barriers, priorities, and bets
- Which monetization challenges SSPs can — and can't — solve
- How to prepare for agentic advertising’s CTV supply chain impact
- How one CTV media owner recovered 33% more revenue in 30 days
- A four-step audit any revenue lead can run in two weeks to find their gap
See where the gap lives in your stack. Access the full guide below.
