Curation was sold as the escape route from the dirty open auction. In 2026 there is almost nothing left to escape from.
99.2 percent of programmatic spend now transacts through private marketplaces, a figure reported by AdExchanger in August 2026 citing ANA data. The ANA’s own published Q4 2025 benchmark put private marketplaces at over 92 percent of median spend across environments, and 100 percent of CTV transactions running through curated channels. Eighteen months earlier the same benchmark measured the PMP share jumping from 64.5 to 87.8 percent in a single quarter.
Now put that next to the quality number. The ANA’s Q1 2026 TrueAdSpend Index, the share of programmatic investment delivering fraud-free, measurable, viewable, MFA-free impressions, sat at 43.3 percent.
So effectively all spend is deal-based, and fewer than half of those dollars reach a qualified impression. Curation stopped being a filter. It became the transaction mechanism.
That is not a quality control story. It is a fee story, and for publishers the question is who is paying the fee.
What is actually in a bid request now
Jounce Media’s analysis found that 73 percent of bidding opportunities were multi-seller curated deals, while just 18.6 percent were pure open auction with no curation attached. The average bid request now carries an open auction plus 3.5 different deal IDs.
The same impression is being curated several times over, by different parties, each describing it as their package.
On price, Jounce puts the median margin-based curation fee at 14 percent, with nearly 40 percent of margin-based fees landing between 5 and 10 percent. That sits on top of standard exchange take, and roughly half of curated deal IDs carry no incremental curation fee at all, which makes an above-median fee a number that needs a story attached.
Buyers cannot see the fee either
TripleLift surveyed 223 advertisers in the US and UK and published the result in June 2026: 99 percent said deal curation is important to their media strategy, only 21 percent rated their own execution as very effective, and 60 percent said they do not know what they are paying for curation.
It is vendor-sponsored research and worth naming as such. It is also the most specific measurement available of a market where the majority of buyers cannot state the price of the thing they are buying.
Add the delivery problem. In IAB Tech Lab’s Deals API announcement, Magnite’s VP of Product Management put it plainly: “Two-thirds of deals are configured with the desired supply, yet deliver no or very little revenue.” Every dead deal ID is bid-request bloat, and in mobile in-app that overhead is paid on the device.
The standards caught up in 2026, which is the part publishers can use
Two releases changed what is declarable.
IAB Tech Lab’s Deals API v1.0, released 4 December 2025, models sellers, packagers and curators as distinct entities, so a deal can finally say who packaged it rather than leaving the buyer to guess.
SupplyChain v1.1, announced 23 June 2026, extends the schain from payment flow to technical custody, covering “Prebid, ad servers, SSAI platforms, SDKs, wrappers, and other infrastructure”, with an hp=0 designation for entities that take custody without being in the payment flow.
For mobile in-app supply this is the consequential one. App inventory already passes through an SDK and usually a mediation layer before any exchange sees it, and those hops have been invisible in the declared chain. v1.1 names them.
IAB Europe followed on 2 July 2026 with a guide to curation that sets out “key questions practitioners should ask before relying on curated marketplaces, including around transparency, data provenance, fees, measurement, control and commercial incentives”.
Four things worth doing this quarter
Where owned supply changes the arithmetic
Curation is, at bottom, a business built on describing inventory accurately enough for a buyer to pay more for it. The cost of that description is what the layer charges.
For example, at AdSpin a large share of the supply is owned and operated, with the rest connected directly, which means the description does not have to be reconstructed by a third party several hops downstream. The app, the placement, the format and the context are known at the source and declared in the bid request.
That is not an argument against curation. It is an argument for asking what exactly the curation fee is paying for, and whether the same accuracy is available without it. Check more at adspin.io.
