February, 2024

First, let's be clear about what curation means to a publisher. It is more than simply organizing media in a way that is helpful for buyers - it also involves ensuring that spend flows through the pipes from buyer to publisher.

February 5, 2024

The idea is to allow one party, typically a data owner, to add their data to publisher-controlled inventory and thereby give a signal to the buyer that the inventory has some additional characteristic.

August 13, 2024

Kraftisms #4 - Curators are using sell-side technologies to enrich publisher inventory and provide a real service to buyers. I’ve been sitting here for three weeks staring at this draft… and not finishing it. I’ve had all sorts of warring emotions and thoughts to feed my writer’s block

Octoberl 15, 2024

Digital advertising companies are pitching white-glove services in an effort to shed the perception that they place ads indiscriminately across the expanse of the internet.

January 19, 2023

“Curation” is table stakes for many in digital advertising — except among advertisers. They continue to buy many of their programmatic ads from one, all-encompassing (often opaque) programmatic marketplace.

October 21, 2024

OMG can we stop with the curation dialog? I guess not since I'm writing about it again. It's always a challenge to the find the exact moment when the tide turns, the zeitgeist unravels, or the vibes become non-immaculate. I'm going to point to the end of the halo around curation as of last Thursday, when Friend-of-the-pod Matt Prohaska put out a press release saying that he is now curating a list of legitimate news-oriented publishers on Index Exchange.

August 13, 2024

The following information was originally presented by Scott Messer of Messer Media at the AdMonsters #PubForum in Boston on August 5th, 2024. Curation is taking over the mainstage, but why is it such a big deal? In short, Curation Houses are aggregating a fragmented landscape and putting checks dire

August 13, 2024

In short, Curation Houses are aggregating a fragmented landscape and putting checks directly into publisher's pockets along the way.

August 13, 2024

Just as I had that experience of being “other,” while bringing my own talents to the table, curators are “other,” as well — not a publisher nor an advertiser — finding their own way to add value.

January 17, 2024

Programmatic auctions are creating so many carbon copies of themselves, it’s threatening to topple the entire structure of programmatic.

October 21, 2024

It’s always a challenge to the find the exact moment when the tide turns, the zeitgeist unravels, or the vibes become non-immaculate. I’m going to point to the end of the halo around curation as of last Thursday, when Friend-of-the-pod Matt Prohaska put out a press release saying that he is now curating a list of legitimate news-oriented publishers on Index Exchange.

May 20, 2024

Sell-side curation is emerging as a post-cookie trend. It involves matching a buyer’s first-party customer data to a publisher’s first-party audience data to create private marketplaces (PMPs).

January 23, 2024

The open web can be a scary place for brands. The targeting signals they once relied on are disappearing, and they’re wasting a ton of money on made-for-advertising sites.

March 5, 2025

Curation has its fair share of skeptics but Index Exchange CEO Andrew Casale isn’t one of them. He sees it as the biggest shake-up in programmatic advertising since header bidding — maybe even bigger.

March 12, 2025

“Unlike SSPs, most curators (which sit in the supply chain but aren’t always classified as SSPs) operate in a black box, often choosing not to disclose their fees or markup structures to buyers,” said Ravi Patel, CEO and co-founder of media platform SWYM.ai. “This is especially concerning when curators are charging 30%+ for repackaging existing SSP inventory into “exclusive” lists without adding real value beyond segmentation.“