Unraveling the SaaS Proposals of Magnite and PubMatic
In 2023, sell-side sources told Digiday that Magnite and PubMatic were quietly testing SaaS-style fees. Both companies declined to confirm it at the time. Here’s what actually happened next, and why the same pattern played out much bigger, and much more publicly, at The Trade Desk.
In early 2024, unnamed sell-side sources told Digiday that Magnite and PubMatic were quietly testing subscription-style pricing, on top of their existing take rates, without disclosing details publicly. Both companies acknowledged, vaguely, an “appetite for experimentation” when asked directly, and declined to say more. That vagueness was the whole story at the time. It stopped being the story once the fees became public.
What was rumoured, and what became fact
By mid-2024, both companies confirmed the fee structures publicly. Magnite told publishers directly that it would charge additional fees for auction packages, curator deals and supply path optimisation programs, on top of its standard take rate. PubMatic’s monthly subscription service for publishers wanting more direct buyer access, running quietly since late 2022, was also confirmed. The “veil of secrecy” phase lasted well under a year before the SSPs themselves closed it, once the fees were established enough to defend publicly rather than deny.
Nothing about that outcome was surprising in hindsight. Once a pricing test proves out commercially, disclosing it stops being a risk and starts being a normal product announcement. The interesting part isn’t that it became public. It’s how long the ambiguity was allowed to sit unaddressed while it was still forming.
The same pattern, played out bigger, at The Trade Desk
The Trade Desk’s OpenPath, the direct-to-publisher buying product this piece originally cited as the “starter pistol” for this shift, is the same story at much larger scale. OpenPath adoption grew substantially, reportedly reaching around 10% of The Trade Desk’s revenue by the third quarter of its 2025 fiscal year, with major CTV publishers including Fox, Disney and Spotify onboarded. But the same opacity concern that shaped the original Magnite and PubMatic story followed OpenPath as it scaled: in February 2026, Adweek confirmed that both Dentsu and WPP had quietly exited OpenPath, citing a lack of transparency into where their ad spend actually landed and what they described as hidden fees. Other media buyers had already begun pulling spend over the same concern months earlier.
The product itself wasn’t the problem in either case, SaaS-style pricing and direct publisher connections are both reasonable evolutions of programmatic infrastructure. The problem, in both stories, was the gap between what the platform was charging and what it was willing to show the people paying for it.
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The through-line: opacity is the actual risk
Neither story is really about SSP or DSP pricing models specifically. Both are about what happens when a platform introduces a new monetisation layer without disclosing its mechanics to the people paying for it, and how long that ambiguity is tolerated before it becomes a trust problem serious enough for major agency holding companies to walk away from a product they’d invested years integrating. The pattern held across two completely different companies, two different product categories, and roughly two years apart. That’s not a coincidence specific to any one vendor. It’s what happens by default when disclosure is optional and margin is on the table.
What this means for evaluating any platform’s new pricing
Treat vague answers about a new fee, program or monetisation layer as informative, not as a temporary gap to be patient about. “We’re always experimenting” or “pricing varies by tier” without specifics is exactly the answer both SSPs gave in 2023, before the real numbers came out anyway a few months later. Asking for the actual fee structure in writing before committing spend, the same principle covered in Key Questions To Ask Your Retail Media Partners, applies just as directly to programmatic infrastructure as it does to retail media.
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Get the Executive PlaybooksMagnite, PubMatic and SSP/DSP Fee Transparency: FAQ
Are SaaS-style fees now standard across SSPs and DSPs?
Additional fees on top of traditional take rates, for curated access, supply path optimisation or direct connections, have become common across major platforms, though the specific structure and disclosure varies by vendor.
Did the Dentsu and WPP OpenPath exits affect The Trade Desk’s business materially?
Publicly available reporting doesn’t establish a definitive answer to that specifically, and it’s not a call this article makes. What’s documented is that transparency concerns were the stated reason both holding companies gave for exiting.
How can a buyer tell if a platform is being straightforward about a new fee?
A specific, written fee structure with no caveats about “tiers” or “experimentation” is the baseline. Vague language about pricing flexibility, without a number attached when directly asked, is worth treating as a signal rather than dismissing as normal vendor caution.
