Buying and commercials
What is a demand-side platform (DSP)?
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what it means here
Here is what the term means for a UK buyer
The definition above holds anywhere. Buying media in the UK adds the detail below, including where AdBuyMCP does something different.
Platform fees are worth knowing before a negotiation. The Trade Desk's 2024 filing with the SEC works out at a take of about 20%, by our arithmetic, and Google publishes no fee for DV360. AdBuyMCP owns no inventory and works as the layer above DSPs: it plans awareness across sellers that compete with each other, balances the budget between them and reconciles what came back. It is built to buy through StackAdapt, Amazon DSP and others as connectors, none of which has spent yet. If a DSP already covers your channel set well, it is the simpler answer, and the comparison pages say so.
Do you need a DSP?
A DSP is a trading interface built for traders, and an unattended seat tends to buy cheap inventory against a broad audience. At most volumes the person operating the seat costs more than the platform fee, so below the volume that justifies that person, a managed route or a lighter layer usually costs less in total.
DSPs also stop at the edge of programmatic supply. UK cinema and addressable television are booked through sales houses, so a DSP cannot reach them, and a plan that needs either has to book it some other way.
What does a DSP cost on top of its fee?
The platform fee is the visible layer. Supply-side and exchange fees sit underneath it and are rarely quoted: ISBA's 2020 study with PwC found about half of advertiser spend reaching publishers, and 15% that could not be attributed to anyone. Licensed audience data can add its own cost per thousand on top. Compare DSPs on working media, the share of the budget that buys advertising once every layer has taken its cut.
AdBuyMCP prices an awareness plan all-in: one monthly price, set by the size of your market and how often it should see you, from one published rate (£100 a month for every 1,000 people in your market, for each time a week), covering the media and AdBuyMCP's margin together. That puts the platform's share inside the price, so the comparison to make with a DSP is what each channel delivered for the money, which the weekly report shows.
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related terms
These terms sit next to this one
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 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.
same group
These terms are also in Buying and commercials
How media is transacted and where the money goes. The terms in this group are the ones a price conversation turns on.