Inventory Glut and Curation Strategies Shake Up CTV Ad Costs

Two powerful forces are colliding in Connected TV (CTV): a flood of new inventory and an urgent need for smarter supply paths. Together, these trends are reshaping what advertisers pay for CTV ads—and the return they ultimately receive.

 

CTV prices are falling, but there’s a catch. 

CTV media has traditionally carried premium prices, with higher costs per thousand impressions (CPMs) compared to both linear TV and true digital channels. But after years of high prices driven by limited inventory and intense demand, CTV ad costs are finally dropping. When Amazon Prime Video introduced ads early last year, it undercut competitors with significantly lower pricing than Netflix and Max had commanded. 

This aggressive pricing created excess supply, and in response, other streaming giants reduced rates. Netflix and Disney+ each saw CPM drops exceeding 25% in 2024, and industry forecasts now predict that by mid-2025, virtually all major streaming services except Netflix and Max will have average CPMs below $30. 

The gap between CTV and linear CPMs is closing. CTV advertising is no longer a niche, seller's market. It's a scaling medium where costs are normalizing. But a surge in inventory does not mean advertisers automatically benefit. It also introduces complexity and risk that can undermine performance. 
 

The middlemen are multiplying. 

Along with more inventory, CTV's programmatic ecosystem has seen a surge in intermediaries and resellers. This supply path complexity quietly inflates the effective costs advertisers pay and dilutes the working media that reaches publishers.  

The average CTV platform authorized around 30 supply-side platforms (SSPs) to sell its ad inventory in 2024, more than double the number of SSP partnerships just a year prior. That means a single streaming app or channel may sell impressions through dozens of different exchanges and aggregators simultaneously. With so many selling avenues now available, a single Connected TV impression can be found across multiple platforms, commonly resold by different exchange intermediaries. 

While this broad distribution can increase fill rates for publishers, it also creates redundant auctions and layers of fees in the supply chain. 
 

Every hand in the cookie jar takes a cut from your budget. 

Each time a middleman is involved, advertisers pay a fee. Direct auctions from content owners had a $14 median CPM floor last year, while resellers charged $19.50 for the same inventory. That’s a 39% premium for buyers. 

Complexity also breeds opacity. A significant portion of CTV impressions now pass through multi-hop chains, where there is more than one intermediary between publisher and buyer. Such convoluted paths make it difficult for buyers to know which vendor is selling the inventory and how many fees have been taken. Marketers also cannot easily tell how many hands an ad impression passed through before reaching them.  

The practical result of these issues is that advertisers may see less of their budget translating to actual viewer exposures. Each intermediary takes a cut, so the publisher receives a smaller share of the ad spend, and the advertiser’s money is partly wasted on fees. In worst cases, a daisy chain of resellers can lead to duplicate bidding or even fraudulent inventory posing as legitimate.  
 

Cut through the maze to find direct paths to publishers. 

To tackle cost and transparency issues, leading advertisers and agencies are adopting supply path optimization (SPO) and curation strategies in their CTV buying. They are being choosier about which supply partners and channels they buy through, favoring the most direct and high-quality paths. This curation of supply paths is a lever to achieve cost efficiency without sacrificing reach. 

By concentrating spend through a smaller set of vetted paths, buyers can negotiate better CPMs and ensure fewer middlemen are taking a cut. These one-to-one or one-to-few deals mimic the strengths of traditional direct TV buying while using programmatic pipes for execution, and in CTV many are using private marketplaces (PMPs) and deals to get as close to direct as possible. 

A core principle of SPO is eliminating redundant auctions and intermediaries. Buyers are auditing their supply chains using tools to identify which supply sources are direct versus resold. Brands should routinely ask their DSPs and SSPs about policies on resold inventory. If an SSP is merely offering inventory available elsewhere, and charging a fee, that SSP can be excluded. And many DSPs provide features to prioritize direct paths in auctions such as filtering out sellers flagged as resellers when a direct seller is present. 

Tech companies and agencies are also facilitating more direct connections. Marketing Architects’ media-buying AI, Annika, was designed for direct relationships with publishers from day one. Unlike solutions that pile on tech fees and create convoluted paths between advertisers and their audience, this kind of direct DSP-to-publisher integration strips out layers of fees and give buyers a straight line to the source. 

The buy side is also pushing the sell side for greater transparency as a condition of investment. Major agencies have issued CTV transparency initiatives calling for standardized ad metadata like content genre info and fraud safeguards from suppliers. These efforts are backed by big spending clout, and pressure CTV publishers and intermediaries to clean up their supply paths or risk exclusion in plans. 

Supply path optimization and curation are proving to be powerful strategies for savvy CTV buyers. By managing how they buy, not just what they buy, advertisers can capture new inventory cost efficiencies rather than lose them to intermediaries.