On Friday, in a post on X, Jud Spencer, a software developer at DSP The Trade Desk, estimated that bid duplication—when multiple bids for the same ad impression appear in the programmatic bidstream—“is probably a $5-20b+” annual “tax on the Internet.”
To emphasize the scale of the issue, he added that The Trade Desk “at peak sees more than 14.5m bid requests” per second, estimating that roughly “2m of those are unique” (14%) with the remaining 12.5 million (86%) duplicative or waste. Spencer noted that the issue costs The Trade Desk millions, “with zero benefit in total to our customers and suppliers.”
Why This Matters:
Well, it’s a lot of money lost.
Quick recap: Bid duplication happens when an SSP sends multiple bid requests for the same ad impression. The result is a convoluted ecosystem where the same impression is bid on multiple times, driving up costs for the buy-side. Long term, SSPs can also suffer. Keep in mind, bid duplication creates inefficiencies, prompting advertisers to pursue supply path optimization (SPO) efforts. This has led to some SSPs being cut from supply paths entirely.
Spencer’s comments are inline with what The Trade Desk has been saying for years about challenges with bid duplication. In 2020, they gave SSPs a two-week deadline to stop sending duplicate bid requests for the same auction (though it’s unclear how strongly this was enforced). They’ve also championed the use of Global Placement IDs (GPIDs)–publisher-specified placement IDs that are consistent across all SSPs–to help eliminate duplicate impressions.
That said, addressing bid duplication isn’t purely altruistic. By minimizing duplicate bids, DSPs like The Trade Desk can reduce their operational costs—a big deal for public companies who really like cost efficiency.
Experts React:
Here’s Spencer’s tweet and he offers more perspective in the thread:
Our Take:
It will be interesting to see how, or if, bid duplication ever gets “resolved” and what continued standards or steps might be taken to mitigate it. Will this occur in 2025?
Maybe not. As Spencer puts it: “Systematically reducing duplication will benefit both brands and publishers (as a whole, there will be losers). It takes bravery and isn’t likely to be done in 2025 but isn’t expensive.” The “losers” cited here are likely the SSPs, who will have to change their behavior to work towards a duplication “fix,” if possible.
SSPs, what’s your take on all of this? Let us know on X and tag @AdTechRadar.
