Flying blind no more: Playwire’s Jayson Dubin on providing real transparency for publishers

For years, publishers have been asked to show how they make money, while chunks of the buy side stay in the dark. Auction data, fee breakdowns, and quality checks are important for supply, yet many SSPs and DSPs still will not share basic purchase-price information. When publishers lack this data, they’re left optimizing on gut feel instead of real numbers.

That’s the imbalance Rob explores with Playwire’s CEO, Jayson Dubin, using examples from the supply path to show where the system breaks - and how publishers can now get real transparency.

Rob: Publishers have spent years proving their value through transparency: open auction data, detailed reporting, full fee disclosure. Yet much of the buy side still operates behind a curtain. Why has transparency remained so one-sided?

Jayson: Honestly? Because they haven’t had to. The buy side holds the money, SSPs and DSPs control access to it, and publishers need the demand. When you control the purse strings, you set the rules, so most of the pressure to open up has landed on publishers.

After MFA sites poisoned the well, publishers were put under the microscope. As an aggregator for publishers, we cleaned up inventory, opened our books, and proved we were not part of the problem, in order to maintain access to ad spend. But many SSPs and DSPs just carried on. The demand side spent years complaining about publisher opacity, but now that many publishers have embraced transparency, the lack of reciprocity is obvious. After all, trust should be a two-way street.

Rob: You call out one of the biggest blind spots: the difference between what an SSP pays for an impression and what it sells it for. Why is that lack of purchase-price visibility such a problem for publishers trying to optimize yield?

Jayson: Without gross and net bid data, we are flying blind. I don't mind paying a fair fee, but if an SSP takes a large, unknown share and we can't see what they paid versus what they charged, we can't judge value or confirm that their take matches our RevShare. You can't optimize what you can't see or trust what you can't check.

Some partners already share this. For instance, Magnite, PubMatic, and Index Exchange show us much more data, which lets us optimize in ways that help everyone. SSPs that hide behind vague fees are not protecting an edge; they are signalling they can't justify their cut, and the fact that transparency often appears only when you start asking hard questions should worry everyone.

Rob: You talk about “universal buyer identification,” a practical fix that sounds simple but could change everything. How would consistent buyer IDs actually help publishers protect revenue and ad quality day-to-day?

Jayson: We spend significant money on ad quality solutions, yet still end up playing whack-a-mole with malicious redirects and broken creatives because we often can't see who is buying the inventory. When a bad ad hits one of our sites and the supply chain will not expose the buyer, the trail goes cold and protecting users becomes far harder than it should be.

Universal buyer IDs would change that. A malicious ad could be traced to its source immediately, and that buyer blocked proactively instead of after days of detective work. The industry built transaction IDs to give the buy side visibility into overlap and inefficiency, but there is still no equivalent signal flowing back to publishers, and that blind spot costs us revenue and damages user experience every day.

Rob: You tell a story about discovering problems with an SSP only after you started digging. That raises a tough question. If transparency only shows up when someone’s looking, is the system fundamentally broken?

Jayson: When we scrutinized one SSP because their terms were opaque and their reporting was thin, we did find issues, and they fixed what we raised. What really stood out, though, was that our revenue from them jumped sharply within five days of us asking questions - a clear sign that behavior changed once they knew someone was looking.

So the obvious question is what was happening before. I am not saying every SSP behaves that way; we have partners who get this right from the start. The bigger point is that a system where transparency appears only under pressure isn’t just flawed, it is broken. The fix is to make clear standards mandatory across the board, rather than leaving transparency to whichever publishers have the resources and expertise to run audits.

Rob: You name Magnite, PubMatic, and Index Exchange as partners doing transparency right. What are those companies getting right operationally that others could easily adopt if they chose to?

Jayson: They give us clear visibility into their fees and provide the data we need to make informed decisions. They don't hide behind vague language or ask us to take their numbers on faith. They share actionable data, keep communication open, and treat us like partners rather than inventory. That is basic operational transparency.

What sets them apart is attitude, not secret technology. They know that when publishers have better data, we make smarter optimization choices, performance improves, and more money flows to the parts of the chain creating value. They prove that transparent relationships work commercially, which raises a simple question for everyone else: if these companies can operate this way, why is it not the standard?

Rob: Some intermediaries argue that disclosing purchase price or fee details gives away competitive advantage. How do you counter the idea that transparency isn’t a threat to business, but the foundation of trust?

Jayson: Saying that fee transparency gives away competitive advantage is a convenient story that does not hold up. If your edge depends on customers not knowing what you charge, you don't really have an edge, you have a trust problem. Real advantage comes from the value you add, the tools you build, the service you provide, and the outcomes you deliver.

Intermediaries doing transparency well prove this. Magnite, PubMatic, and Index Exchange are not losing deals because they share data with us; they are winning deals because publishers trust them. As publishers get more sophisticated, opacity becomes a weaker strategy. Partners who lean into transparency will be the ones that succeed in the long run because trust is what keeps relationships and revenue growing.

Rob: You’re calling on the IAB, TAG, and other groups to enforce demand-side standards. What would real enforcement look like, and what would change for publishers if those standards finally became mandatory?

Jayson: Real enforcement would apply the same rigor to demand-side behavior that we already see around publisher quality. Purchase price and subsequent bid reporting would be mandatory. Universal buyer IDs would be standard, not optional. SSPs and DSPs would have to meet clear, auditable rules, with real consequences if they did not, using frameworks that already exist on the supply side.

If that happened, publishers could finally optimize with full information instead of guesses. We could identify and block bad actors quickly, verify that fee structures match our contracts, and reduce the capital leaking to intermediaries that are not adding real value. A cleaner, more trustworthy market would ultimately help everyone, including SSPs and DSPs that are prepared to meet those standards.

Rob: Playwire’s built its model on mutual transparency. What’s the one thing publishers should ask their partners tomorrow to know whether they’re operating in that same spirit?

Jayson: Most individual publishers don't have the leverage to force SSPs and DSPs to share purchase price data. If you ask for gross and net bids and the answer is no, you often can't simply walk away, which is why common transparency standards matter. Until that happens, scale helps - companies like us aggregate volume, SSPs listen when we push back, and we use that to ask for purchase price data and negotiate opaque terms.

There is a simple test any publisher can use. Ask your monetization partners whether you can directly access analytics that show how your revenue is generated - which content, authors, and content types perform best - so you can make real strategic decisions.

Jordan Greer from GTPlanet puts it perfectly: "As a publisher it has always felt like a black box. We are beholden to the ad network and have to take them at their word." Before getting access to RAMP’s Advanced Yield Analytics, he felt like he'd been "flying blind for the past 21 years." If your partner can't offer similar visibility, that says a lot about how they view the relationship.

Illuminating the darkness

If this all sounds uncomfortably familiar when you look at your own reports, it might be time to ask tougher questions of your monetization partners. Playwire is pushing for a world where purchase prices, fees, and buyer identities are visible by default, not uncovered only when you start an audit. Learn more about how that works in practice, or contact the team at playwire.com.

This is content created in paid partnership with Playwire. We only feature partners who we believe bring real value to the publisher community.