Where does your ad spend actually go?

Programmatic advertising promised us scale. Efficiency. Smarter targeting. And hey, it’s delivered on a lot of that.

But there’s a catch: for every £1 an advertiser spends, more than half of it never makes it to the publisher. According to the Dhar Method, a whopping 55% gets eaten up by a maze of middlemen - DSPs, SSPs, exchanges and assorted tech partners.

We’re not anti-tech. Quite the opposite. But when the cost of “doing business” in adtech starts looking more like a black hole for budgets, it’s time to ask some tough questions.

The game behind the game

Here’s a pretty typical scenario:

• An advertiser bids $5 CPM through a DSP
• The DSP takes 20%, so $4 is left
• The exchange and SSP carve off another chunk
• The publisher ends up with around $2.50

That’s half the original spend, gone before it ever reaches an audience.

Meanwhile, everyone’s talking about performance, ROAS, cost-per-whatever - but the system itself is bleeding value. It’s not a small leak. It’s a full-blown drip tray under the entire industry.

Cheaper ≠ better

There’s also been a long-running obsession with lowering CPMs. And sure, cheaper sounds great. Until you realise it usually means:

• Higher fraud risk
• Lower-quality inventory
• Made-for-advertising websites with zero real audience

Real, trusted publishers come with real costs. But they also deliver real results. In one example we saw, a major financial brand paid 40% higher CPMs to a curated list of premium publishers, and achieved a 70% boost in conversions. They spent less overall, delivered better outcomes, and reached actual humans. Win-win-win.

Enter: fixed pricing, finally

We think there’s a better way. Actually let's reframe that. We know there is.

At @curate, we’re flipping the model on its head with a fully transparent pricing structure. Instead of hiding fees behind margins, we separate media costs from tech fees entirely. That means:

• A fixed CPM fee
• No revenue-share markup nonsense
• Transparent, predictable pricing
• Zero incentive for us to push higher-cost inventory

Simple. Fair. Transparent. And - shock horror - it actually works.

So what’s the result?

More of your media budget goes into… well, media:

• Up to 75% of spend reaches publishers (vs under 50% with rev-share)
• 1.5x more impressions delivered in performance display campaigns
• 60% lower cost-per-completed-view in CTV campaigns

And yes, it’s scalable and works across channels. And yes, you still get all the good stuff: efficiency, reach, performance.

Keeping it real

We’re not here to build a walled garden or sell you a dream. We’re just removing the waste and weird incentives from media buying through smart, full-scope curation.

Because when advertisers get better results, and publishers get fairly paid, everyone wins.

Want to see how it looks on your campaigns? Find us and say hi! atcurate.ai