The industry keeps saying CTV’s supply chain needs to be “cleaned up.” Fewer intermediaries. Fewer pipes. More “direct” paths. The assumption is that complexity itself is the problem — that if we flatten the ecosystem, transparency and efficiency will follow. But what if complexity isn’t dysfunction? What if it’s simply the structural reality of how CTV works? Sara Sinclair, Vice President of Ad Platforms, TVIQ, shares her thoughts.
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Is the industry misdiagnosing the issue with CTV’s supply chain?
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I think so.
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When people talk about “cleaning up” the CTV supply chain, they often treat complexity itself as the problem. The focus becomes reducing the number of intermediaries or pushing spend through a smaller set of preferred pipes. That sounds reasonable if you assume those extra layers are unnecessary.
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For most publishers they are necessary. Buyers demand scale that many publishers can’t meet on their own, so they rely on distribution and monetization partners that can bundle it. That creates multiple authorized paths and layered selling rights, where the same inventory can appear very differently depending on the path.
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The friction shows up when those layers aren’t described clearly. When buyers can’t easily understand who is authorized to sell inventory and under what arrangement, they respond by preferencing only large publishers, a narrower set of pipes, and implement blanket “reseller” bans. Over time, supply path becomes a proxy for value. Inventory is judged by how it reaches the buyer, not by its underlying quality.
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If buyers had a consistent way to see and evaluate these relationships, they could assess inventory on its own merits. That would shift value back toward the publisher and reduce the pressure to consolidate everything into a few controlled endpoints.
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How should buyers think differently about “direct” and “resold” inventory in a market where monetization is often shared or delegated?
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Buyers should recognize that “direct” and “reseller” have lost much of their descriptive power in CTV.
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Reseller has become a dirty word. It’s treated as shorthand for inefficiency, opacity, or unnecessary margin. Buyers use it to signal preference for “direct” supply, implying that certain paths are inherently cleaner. But when you look at how inventory actually moves through CTV, those labels often invert reality.
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Some of the largest aggregators in the market collect inventory from thousands of publishers, package it inside their own environments, and sell it as unified endpoints. That activity is functionally reselling, yet it is routinely treated as direct. At the same time, publishers that authorize partners to sell their inventory through distribution or monetization agreements are often described as “resold,” even when the underlying relationship is straightforward and authorized.
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That’s the deeper issue. When we lack a clear, shared language for representing how selling rights are structured, blunt labels like “direct” and “reseller” step into the vacuum. If we want buyers to evaluate inventory on its merits, we need more precise ways to describe who is authorized to sell it and in what capacity.
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If we accept that CTV monetization is structurally more complex than display, what needs to change about how we represent it?
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We need to update ads.txt, because that’s where representation begins.
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ads.txt is the industry’s public record of who is authorized to sell inventory. If that layer can’t clearly describe how CTV supply is structured, everything downstream becomes interpretive. The goal isn’t to replace ads.txt. It’s to expand it so it can express what already exists in the market.
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That starts with taxonomy. Publishers should be able to declare the exact roles their partners play instead of collapsing all authority into a handful of generic labels. Those declarations should carry consistent meaning wherever they are read.
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It also means treating concurrent and delegated selling authority as normal. CTV inventory is routinely sold through multiple authorized paths at once, so shared and limited-scope rights should be representable without implying exclusivity or creating confusion.
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And beyond basic authorization, publishers should be able to signal trusted or preferred relationships directly, rather than leaving prioritization to inference inside buying platforms.
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CTV monetization is structurally layered, and that won’t change. What can change is how those layers are made legible, and therefore trustworthy. When the representation layer reflects reality, buyers can evaluate supply confidently on its own merits. With relatively modest evolutions to ads.txt, we can build trust back into the supply chain instead of trying to flatten it into a handful of preferred pipes. This is ultimately what will benefit the ecosystem over the long run.
