Take rate
In practice, for a UK buyer
The paragraph above is the neutral answer. This is the part a vendor glossary leaves out.
The single most useful number to ask any media platform for, and the one most often deflected. Observed rates on desk research dated 3 August 2026: The Trade Desk about 20%, DV360 around 10 to 15%, generic DSPs 5 to 15%, UK agencies 10 to 30% with minimum monthly fees of £500 to £1,000. MNTN's own documentation states it keeps an undisclosed percentage inside the CPM. AdBuyMCP charges 10% of media, falling to 5% plus £749 a month above £25,000 of trailing thirty-day spend, with one ledger entry accruing per delivery row so the fee sits beside the media it was charged on. That is a contractual commitment and a design property; it is not yet a demonstrated practice, because no rail has ever spent.
Goes deeper: The fee waterfall
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.
Ad tech tax
The cumulative share of an advertiser's budget taken by the intermediaries between advertiser and publisher — demand platform, exchange, supply platform, data vendors, verification — none of which individually looks large.
Working media
The portion of an advertising budget that actually buys advertising, as opposed to the portion consumed by platform fees, data costs, agency fees, ad serving and production. Usually expressed as a percentage of total spend.
Arbitrage
Buying media at one price and reselling it to the advertiser at a higher one, keeping the difference undisclosed. Distinct from a disclosed fee in that the advertiser cannot see what the media actually cost.
Rate card
A seller's published list prices for its advertising inventory, before any negotiation, discount or volume agreement is applied to them. In practice most large media is bought below rate card, which makes the card a starting position rather than a price.
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