Trust, scale, and the new economics of programmatic with Jounce Media’s Chris Kane
BY HAZEL BROADLEY, BEELER.TECH
This conversation is for our exclusive publishers and partners only community. Please ask in the community for the password to watch this video.
For more than a decade, digital media monetization has been defined by scale, automation, and relentless technical optimization. Programmatic promised efficiency at internet scale, and publishers obliged by plugging into every pipe they could find, adding partners, intermediaries, and layers of optimization in pursuit of incremental yield.
But as buyers have grown more sophisticated and, frankly, more skeptical, that era is giving way to something more deliberate. Across adops, programmatic, and media investment teams, the conversation has shifted from “How much inventory can we access?” to “Who do we trust with our dollars?”.
In December’s Camp․Fire, guest speaker Chris Kane, Founder of Jounce Media, unpacked the findings from their latest annual market sentiment survey. Drawing on responses from 500+ industry participants evaluating the 50 largest sources of programmatic supply in the market, Chris provided a rare, data-driven overview of how publishers and supply-side platforms are perceived by the buy side and, crucially, how those perceptions translate directly into spend.
The takeaway: trust and awareness are no longer abstract brand metrics. They are among the strongest predictors of revenue outcomes for publishers and platforms alike.
Inside the Jounce survey: how trust is measured
Participants were asked a straightforward question:
Is this inventory (or platform) a good investment for the typical advertiser?
From those responses, Jounce derived two core metrics. First, awareness measured how many respondents felt informed enough to have an opinion at all. Second, NPS captured sentiment, distinguishing promoters from detractors among those with an opinion. Plotting awareness against NPS created a clear taxonomy: high-trust, medium-trust, and low-trust companies.
The power of the analysis wasn’t any single dot on the chart, Chris emphasized, but in the overall shape of the data and how consistently that shape has persisted over multiple years.
Publishers now represent a healthier market, with clear winners
One of the most encouraging findings was just how much healthier publisher sentiment has become. In earlier years, the bottom-left quadrant of low awareness and negative sentiment was crowded, driven largely by MFA supply and aggressive monetization tactics. Thankfully, that cohort has largely vanished.
Today, nearly all of the top 50 programmatically traded publisher portfolios have a positive NPS, and the most trusted names sit firmly in the top-right quadrant with near-universal awareness and strong favorability.
But this isn’t just about reputation. Jounce’s spend analysis showed that over half of all programmatic spend flows to publishers with high trust scores, even though they account for a smaller share of total bid requests. In contrast, publishers with negative sentiment capture a disproportionately small share of spend.
Chris attributed this imbalance to a structural shift in buying behavior. Agencies and brands are increasingly relying on inclusion lists built around trusted publisher portfolios rather than broad exclusion strategies. Buyers are making deliberate “portfolio choices,” opting into entire ecosystems they trust and, in the process, overlooking long-tail and subscale publishers entirely. The result is a market that rewards trust and scale, but quietly sidelines those without either.
The subscale publisher problem
Chris was explicit: subscale publishers aren’t being actively blocked, but they are being ignored. Without the resources to invest in sales, relationships, and market visibility, many simply never make it onto inclusion lists.
Panelists echoed this from lived experience. Even high-quality niche publishers struggle to break through unless they are part of a larger portfolio, backed by a sales organization, or bundled through SSP-curated deals. Technical excellence, Chris argued, is now table stakes. It is no longer sufficient on its own.
This reality leads to a hard but increasingly unavoidable question for independent publishers: Do you have the scale to justify the fixed costs of trust-building in today’s market, or do you need to align with a larger portfolio that does?
SSPs: consolidation without M&A
If the publisher landscape looked healthier, the SSP picture was far more polarized. Awareness for many of the top 50 SSPs remains surprisingly low, and negative sentiment is far more common than on the publisher side. Yet spend is even more concentrated.
SSPs with high trust scores – those integrated with all five major DSPs – handle roughly 80% of bid requests and an even larger share of spend. This isn’t necessarily because buyers explicitly favor them, Chris noted, but because DSPs are aggressively managing QPS allocation. A handful of SSPs get the ‘fat’ pipes, while everyone else gets the ‘skinny’ ones.
The strongest predictor of SSP trust turned out to be simple: direct DSP integrations. Platforms with full buy-side connectivity enjoy positive sentiment; those without it, especially those reliant on reselling demand through other SSPs, skew heavily negative.
That finding sparked a deep discussion around reselling models, bid enrichment, and whether tier-two and tier-three SSPs truly bring unique demand. Chris was candid in his skepticism. While some resellers do line up direct demand and deserve compensation for sales-driven value, he found it implausible that low-trust SSPs possess auction or enrichment capabilities that larger, better-resourced platforms cannot replicate.
Where are we headed in 2026?
As we move toward a trust-based marketplace, open RTB is not disappearing, but it is becoming more selective. High-awareness, high-trust companies, on both the publisher and platform side, are capturing a growing share of value, and technical arbitrage alone no longer works at scale.
Looking ahead, Chris also touched on emerging ideas like agent-based buying and ad-centric protocols, suggesting that while they are exciting, they remain distant. More realistic, he argued, are incremental steps that reduce duplication and inefficiency, such as moving from millions of discrete bid requests toward session-based “buy orders.”
Whatever the mechanism, the direction is clear: fewer pipes, clearer signals, and more intentional decision-making.
Trust is no longer a soft concept or a branding exercise. It is an economic lever. For some, the path forward will mean doubling down on sales, partnerships, and inclusion strategies. For others, it may mean consolidation or joining larger portfolios that can carry the fixed costs of trust-building in a more deliberate marketplace. To learn more about the latest report, chat to Chris and the team at contact@jouncemedia.com.