This article explores why premium publishers — known for quality journalism and loyal audiences — are undervalued in the programmatic ad ecosystem, and what needs to change.
In a digital marketplace built to reward reach, volume, and quantifiable efficiency, the most trusted and editorially rigorous publishers — the Premium Publishers — consistently fall behind.
By “Premium Publishers,” we refer to well-established media organisations such as The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, and Le Figaro — brands known for original journalism, editorial integrity, and long-standing relationships with loyal audiences. These publishers maintain high standards not just in their reporting but in the environments where that content is delivered, whether via websites, apps, or other digital platforms.
At first glance, this seems paradoxical. Premium publishers invest in quality, trust, and delivering an exceptional audience experience. Yet, when programmatic ad budgets are distributed, they capture only a fraction of the spend. Why?
Because the mechanics of the programmatic supply chain are not built to recognise quality, they are built to scale it.
This article is not about blaming individual websites or media strategies. It’s about understanding the structural logic of programmatic advertising and why it continues to divert ad dollars away from trusted environments and into those optimised for scale, not substance.
Premium publishers — national news outlets, editorial brands, investigative media — typically operate with:
Meanwhile, high-scale entertainment or utility content dominates much of the open programmatic market. These sites are designed to maximise:
The consequence is significant but straightforward: Premium publishers generate far less programmatic inventory and fewer opportunities to capture ad spend, even with higher CPMs.
To understand why Premium publishers lose out, we need to look beyond CPMs and consider the full revenue equation.
Let’s take two typical publisher profiles:
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Using a simplified formula:
Revenue per 1,000 sessions = Impressions per session × CPM / 1000
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Despite commanding higher CPMs, Premium publishers generate ~50% less revenue per 1,000 sessions. This reflects a structural disadvantage, not a performance issue.
Premium environments are deliberately designed with fewer ads per page, fewer refreshes, and longer-form editorial content. These design choices enhance trust and engagement but reduce the volume of monetizable inventory. As a result, programmatic logic disproportionately favours publishers who optimise for ad density, not content quality.
To understand the structural imbalance, it’s helpful to ask:
When 1€ enters the programmatic ecosystem, how much of it actually lands on premium inventory?
Using Pubstack data, we identified Premium Publishers as those with lower ad pressure, specifically, sites with fewer than 1.862 auctions per session, representing the lowest 10% in auction intensity across the dataset. This is a strong proxy for editorial quality, as lower auction frequency typically reflects fewer refreshes, stricter ad load policies, and a more user-centric experience.
Based on this threshold, these Premium publishers account for 35% of all programmatic sessions in our dataset, indicating that trusted environments continue to attract substantial audience attention.
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However, their ability to monetise those sessions is significantly constrained. The data shows:
Let’s estimate how this plays out in total ad spend:
→ Resulting Spend Split:
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So when 1€ enters the programmatic ecosystem, only about 0.21€ lands in trusted, editorially driven environments, even though they account for more than a third of total sessions.
This is the core imbalance: Premium publishers capture attention, loyalty, and trust — yet the system undervalues them in favour of inventory volume, not quality.
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The programmatic ecosystem is fully automated, but often lacks context awareness.
Buyers optimise toward what is easily measurable:
However, many of the signals that define true quality—such as editorial trust, ad-to-content balance, user attention, or contextual depth—are either missing, undervalued or inconsistently applied in buying platforms.
Let’s take a closer look.
Click-through rate (CTR) offers a surprising insight. Contrary to the assumption that performance is higher on Non-Premium publishers, Pubstack data show that Premium publishers consistently record higher CTRs (0.19%) than their high-ad-pressure counterparts (0.11%). This suggests that environments built on trust, relevance, and content quality drive more intentional engagement.
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Yet, this clear signal of performance is not always valued. In many DSPS, CTR is treated as a secondary signal compared to viewability or bid price. So even when Premium environments outperform, the system may not reward them accordingly.
Viewability is another case in point. Non-premium websites often achieve higher viewability rates than the Premium average (which hovers around 66%), thanks to tactics like sticky ads, stacked placements, and frequent auto-refresh.
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At first glance, this may seem like a win—and in part, it is. Pubstack data shows that eCPMs tend to improve with rising viewability, confirming that advertisers pay more when they believe their ads are likely to be seen.
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But the relationship isn’t linear. Around the 75% viewability mark, eCPM gains begin to plateau. This suggests diminishing returns for pushing viewability beyond a certain point, especially when those gains require aggressive formats that compromise user experience.
In other words, inflating viewability numbers may help capture more budget in the short term, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect a better advertising environment. It’s a tactical optimisation, not a long-term strategy.
This is the core challenge for premium publishers. They optimise for trust, sustainability, and editorial integrity, not for stacking ads or maximising scroll traps. But under today’s logic, these qualitative advantages are under-recognised because the supply chain lacks the right signals to detect and value them.
Part of the problem lies in the fragmentation and automation of the supply chain.
Between them lies a black box of intermediaries, algorithms, and lost context.
What’s missing is dialogue and a shared understanding of value. If buyers and sellers were aligned on what “quality” truly means, much of today’s inefficiency in programmatic advertising could be avoided.
Until then, publishers who invest in trust, transparency, and long-term engagement will continue to lose out—not because they’re underperforming but because the system misreads them.
A few things are already moving in the right direction:
But these innovations are still marginal.
What’s needed is a mindset shift: to design a programmatic system that doesn’t just chase impressions, but recognises environments built on trust, intention, and relevance.
To do that, we need:
Programmatic advertising has become the default monetisation engine of the internet — and, increasingly, the financial lifeline of premium media. For publishers that invest in quality journalism, editorial integrity, and long-term trust, programmatic is no longer optional. It’s essential.
Yet the current system is structurally biased against them.
It favours scale over substance and volume over value. It rewards refresh-heavy tactics, ad-saturated pages, and networks designed to maximise impressions, not to inform, engage, or build trust.
Premium publishers — from Le Monde and The Guardian to The New York Times — operate under stricter standards. They serve fewer ads, respect their audiences, and uphold the principles that make the open web worth sustaining. But that very commitment to quality leaves them at a structural disadvantage in the current programmatic supply chain.
The result? They capture a fraction of the spend, not because they underperform, but because the system isn’t built to recognise what they offer.
This isn’t just a misallocation of ad budgets. It’s a misalignment of incentives at the heart of digital media.
If we want a future where trusted voices thrive — and where journalism can remain independent, pluralistic, and sustainable — then programmatic must evolve. We need infrastructure that values quality, transparency, and editorial integrity, not just scale.
Premium publishers aren't just part of the ecosystem — they are what make it viable. It's time the system recognised that.
