Lightning-fast delivery, analogue payment speed: why the adtech payment chain needs collapsing

Whatever the headlines might tell you, it is money - not AI, or cookies, or regulation - that truly plagues independent publishers, agencies and adtech players. The average digital media supplier now waits well over 100 days to see the payment from last quarter’s campaigns.

Sometimes, the delay is written into the contract itself: in the case of one agency review in an adjacent sector, the RFP stipulated 360-day payment terms. But more often, the issue is simply one of unagreed late payment.

The squeeze is a particularly cruel one, because while a supplier waits to be paid by its client, it still has to pay the big platforms - deployed for the client’s benefit - within 15-30 days, or face being switched off.

That might look like the price of doing business. But in reality, it represents a stealth tax on innovation, a systemic cash-flow bottleneck that shapes every creative, commercial, and career decision further down the supply chain.

Luckily, there is technology emerging that will make payments flow as fast as pixels through the internet, but it’s more a question of how long it takes for companies to realise they can implement it. 

The slow payment incentive

Digital advertising runs on real-time dashboards, yet when you zoom out, payment behaviour looks distinctly analogue. Revving’s own data shows a two-to-four-month gap between being contracted and actually getting paid is common across the supply chain. That window widens whenever economic uncertainty bites: CFOs hoard cash, interest rates rise, and ‘net-60’ quietly becomes ‘net-120’.

So the problem is not visibility; it’s incentive. Holding onto cash is profitable for organisations with scale. Without a countervailing force in place, payment terms drift only the wrong way.

Data is collateral

The key to improving the financial infrastructure of the supply chain is data. Specifically, it’s about having a platform that plugs directly into the APIs of dozens of big marketplaces; ingesting granular, real-time transaction data, and valuing receivables the instant they are generated. Instead of waiting 100 days, a publisher should be able to access that revenue the same week it is earned.

This is not old-school invoice factoring. By shifting credit risk upstream - towards the giant, investment-grade counterparties that ultimately release the cash - a far higher percentage of revenue can be funded at materially lower cost. Where banks see fragmented SMEs, we see a single, data-rich asset class that happens to be dispersed across thousands of screens.

Liquidity has a cumulative effect

Faster cash is more than a sticking plaster - it’s rocket fuel. Independent modelling on our efforts to accelerate £1.8 billion into the UK adtech sector suggests that unleashing this working capital into the sector would deliver a 4.8x GDP multiplier, equating to £8.6 billion of incremental economic output over three years.

The digital advertising industry already contributes £129bn annually to the UK economy. Removing its liquidity bottleneck would be the cheapest growth stimulus that the Treasury never has to fund.

Late payment should carry a reputational risk

Whenever I present these numbers, someone inevitably asks whether we should legislate 30-day terms. I understand the instinct, but history shows that top-down edicts rarely work in complex value chains. The first step is radical transparency.

Affiliate networks already publish dashboards that grade advertisers on payment punctuality. Extend that logic to programmatic, CTV, and creator ecosystems, and late payment becomes a reputational risk, not a hidden arbitrage. Industry bodies are also moving: for instance, the Affiliate & Partner Marketing Association (APMA) has just released its payment report. But data without daylight changes nothing.

We need analysis of real-world payment performance across hundreds of companies, identifying who pays on time and who regularly slips by months. My ambition is to offer a ‘Good Payer’ stamp of approval - think Fairtrade for liquidity - so that every supplier can price risk accurately and negotiate from a position of strength.

Three steps to a Fairtrade future

Achieving liquidity isn’t a single-player game; it requires each part of the ecosystem to play their own part simultaneously to start closing the cash-flow gap:

1. Brands and agencies should audit their own payment practices. If their partners are borrowing at double-digit rates to front their campaign spend, the cost returns to them in media inflation or reduced innovation.
2. Platforms and networks should publish live payment-performance scores. Transparency is free and immediately shifts behaviour towards on-time settlement.
3. Publishers, affiliates and creators should stop treating long payment terms as inevitable overhead, and instead tap the liquidity tools available to redeploy that capital into product, people, and performance.

A call to collective action

The digital economy runs on confidence. During the pandemic, when confidence diminished, extended terms became muscle memory that many giants have yet to relax. Unless we change course, the next downturn will repeat the same pattern - and more independent voices will disappear in the squeeze.

Collapsing payment terms is not just a business model; it is a necessity for a diverse, innovative media ecosystem. Faster, fairer cash keeps risk-taking alive, funds better journalism, and ensures that the next big platform can be built in Shoreditch instead of Silicon Valley.

And while the technology might ‘make money move at internet speed,’ the real acceleration needed is in our mindset. Waiting months to be paid for work delivered in weeks, days, or in the case of programmatic, even milliseconds, is no longer acceptable. If we can fix that, we will see the whole industry rev a lot harder.