Demand-side platform (DSP)
In practice, for a UK buyer
The paragraph above is the neutral answer. This is the part a vendor glossary leaves out.
Observed platform fees vary widely and are worth knowing before a negotiation: The Trade Desk's take rate was about 20% in 2024, DV360 sits around 10 to 15%, and the generic DSP tier runs 5 to 15%, on desk research dated 3 August 2026. We are not a DSP and own no inventory. It is the layer above them: it translates one audience into what each rail accepts, allocates budget between sellers that compete with each other, and reconciles what came back. It buys through StackAdapt, Amazon DSP and others as rails. If your channel set is one a DSP already covers well, a DSP is the simpler answer and this site says so on its comparison pages.
Goes deeper: How we compare
What this one connects to
Most confusion in media buying comes from two adjacent terms being used interchangeably, so these are the neighbours worth reading next.
Supply-side platform (SSP)
Software a publisher uses to sell its advertising inventory to many buyers at once, running the auction and setting price floors. It sits on the seller's side of the same market a DSP buys from.
Real-time bidding (RTB)
The auction mechanism underneath most programmatic advertising: when an impression becomes available, buyers are invited to bid on it and the winner's advert is served, all within roughly a hundred milliseconds.
Take rate
The share of an advertiser's media budget retained by the platform rather than spent on media, whether that share is disclosed or embedded in the price. The word is neutral about disclosure, which is why the useful question is the figure rather than the policy.
Ad exchange
A marketplace in which advertising impressions are auctioned between demand-side platforms buying and supply-side platforms selling. It matches bids to inventory in the milliseconds between a page or stream starting to load and the advert appearing.
More on buying and commercials
How media is transacted and where the money goes. The terms in this group are the ones a fee conversation turns on.
45 minutes. Bring a real brief and we compile it live. You describe one audience and watch it compile into seven targeting specifications, each with the score for how much of the definition survived.
Talk it through