Every publisher is having the same conversation right now.
“We’re reducing SSPs.”
“We’re consolidating.”
“We’re doing SPO.”
Sounds like progress. Sometimes it is.
But Supply Path Optimization was never meant to be an exercise in counting partners. It was meant to be an exercise in creating value. Somewhere along the way, those two things got confused, and a lot of publishers are now optimizing for the wrong metric without realizing it.
The wrong question
“How many partners should we have?” is not the same question as “which partners create value?”
The first is easy to answer. It fits neatly into a slide, a board update, a line in a vendor review. The second is harder, it requires actually looking at what each partner does, not just how many there are.
Cutting your SSP count doesn’t improve monetization. It just reduces a number. If the partner you removed wasn’t bringing incremental demand, nothing changes. Your revenue looks the same, your stack looks smaller, and everyone moves on assuming that’s a win.
But what if the partner you removed was the only one bringing buyers nobody else had? What if they were consistently winning auctions that other partners simply weren’t in? What if they were quietly responsible for a meaningful share of net revenue on specific inventory, inventory that now monetizes worse because that source of competition is gone?
In that case, SPO didn’t optimize anything. It just cut revenue and called it strategy.
Every partner earns its place — continuously
The goal was never to keep an SSP because it’s already integrated. It’s also not to remove one because someone decided, somewhat arbitrarily, that the number on the list looked too high.
Every SSP should earn its place, on an ongoing basis, based on evidence.
The questions worth asking are not complicated:
- Does this partner bring incremental demand, or does it simply re-route spend that was already coming your way through another path?
- Does it have real deal-based demand — PMPs, curated deals, direct buyer relationships — or is it entirely dependent on open-market auctions?
- Does it improve yield, or does it just look competitive without actually lifting outcomes?
- Does it increase real competition in the auction, or add another bidder chasing the same budget?
- Is the reporting genuinely net/net and transparent, or does it just present that way?
- Does it run on its own infrastructure, or is it renting compute from a cloud provider and passing that cost on to you?
- Does it make your supply chain cleaner — or does it add another hop, another fee, another layer of opacity?
- And when something breaks — a discrepancy, a fill-rate drop, a reporting mismatch — do you get a partner who picks up the phone, or a ticket number in a queue?
Those are the conversations that actually determine whether SPO is working. Everything else is noise.
What’s actually behind the logo
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. A lot of SSP evaluation still happens by recognition rather than by evidence, the logo you’ve seen at every industry event, the name on every panel, the partner everyone already has, so nobody questions why.
That’s marketing doing its job. It’s not the same as a partner doing its job.
Two things worth actually digging into, because they rarely show up in a pitch deck:
Does this partner bring solid deal-based demand, PMPs, curated buyer relationships, direct advertiser access, or does it live entirely in the open market? Open-market-only supply isn’t inherently bad, but it’s rarely incremental. It’s the same buyers, bidding through yet another door.
And what is this partner actually running on? A partner with its own infrastructure has a cost structure that scales sensibly and margin to reinvest in the relationship. A partner that’s fully dependent on rented cloud infrastructure is outsourcing the expensive part of its business, and that cost doesn’t disappear. It shows up somewhere. Usually in the take-rate, or in a support model that can’t afford to be hands-on because the infrastructure bill already ate the margin.
Neither of these questions gets asked often enough, because neither shows up on a booth banner. But they explain a lot about why some partners can offer real economics and genuine support, and others can only offer scale.
Incremental demand changes everything
This is where a lot of SPO discussions become surprisingly academic. The debate circles around the number of SSPs, the number of integrations, the size of the stack, as if the stack itself were the thing generating revenue.
It isn’t.
Publishers don’t monetize fewer integrations. They monetize demand. That distinction sounds obvious written down, but it’s the exact thing that gets lost once “reducing SSPs” becomes a KPI in its own right, and once “which SSPs are well-known” quietly substitutes for “which SSPs actually perform.”
If a partner introduces buyers who weren’t already competing for your inventory, that partner isn’t adding complexity for the sake of complexity. It’s adding competition. And competition is the mechanism that actually moves yield, not the shape or size of your partner list, and not how familiar the name is.
The right partner doesn’t reshuffle revenue you already had. It creates revenue that wasn’t there before. That’s a fundamentally different contribution than a partner who simply duplicates demand another SSP was already bringing in, dressed up in better marketing.
Test continuously. Keep selectively.
Here’s the part that sounds counterintuitive: the best SPO strategy may actually involve testing more partners, not fewer.
Not because every SSP deserves a permanent seat at the table, most won’t earn one, and that’s fine. But because every SSP deserves the chance to prove, with real data, whether it can create incremental value on your specific inventory, with your specific demand mix, in your specific markets.
Some won’t hold up. The data will show it clearly, and removing them will genuinely simplify the stack without costing anything. Others will surprise you, quietly outperforming partners that have been integrated for years and recognized at every conference, simply because nobody had recently checked.
The decision to keep or remove a partner should be based on evidence, tested deliberately, not on brand recall or assumptions carried over from a stack that hasn’t been re-evaluated in a while.
If a partner genuinely increases revenue, brings real deal demand, runs efficient infrastructure, and reports transparently, it has earned its place, regardless of how long it’s been integrated or how loud its marketing is.
And if removing a partner changes nothing? That’s not proof your SPO strategy worked. That’s evidence the partner probably wasn’t contributing much to begin with, which is useful information, but it isn’t the same as optimization.
The real goal
Supply Path Optimization shouldn’t optimize for the smallest stack, and it shouldn’t optimize for the most recognizable one either. A lean stack full of familiar names is not, by itself, an achievement. It’s only meaningful if every partner left in it is earning its place through demonstrable, incremental value.
The publishers getting this right aren’t the ones with the fewest logos in their ads.txt file, or the ones whose stack reads like an event sponsor list. They’re the ones who know, with evidence, exactly what each remaining partner contributes — deal demand, infrastructure, incrementality, support — and who are willing to test new ones rather than assume the current list is already optimal.
SPO isn’t about running the leanest stack, or the best-known one.
It’s about running the strongest one.
ConnectAd is a European boutique SSP connecting premium publishers with quality demand through curated, efficient, and transparent programmatic partnerships. With a strong focus on PMP activation, low take-rates, clean supply paths, and hands-on support, ConnectAd helps publishers, advertisers, and DSPs build better programmatic connections.
