Publishers back OpenAds to bring transparency to programmatic ad auctions

Publishers are making a renewed push to clean up their digital ad supply chains as they head into 2026, backing new infrastructure aimed at finally forcing transparency into the open market.

AccuWeather, Bustle, The Arena Group, BuzzFeed, the Guardian, Hearst Magazines, Hearst TV, Newsweek, People Inc., and Ziff Davis are among the major publishers to announce their support for OpenAds, The Trade Desk’s new solution designed to deliver more direct and transparent auctions.

Throughout 2025, buyers and sellers prioritized supply chain efficiency, working to eliminate persistent issues such as bid duplication, excessive intermediaries creating unnecessary hops and metadata manipulation that undermines auction integrity.

At Bustle Digital Group, executives believe much of that confusion can be avoided by sending buyers a standardized set of signals.

“Obfuscation doesn’t help buyers make better decisions,” said Darjan Milojkovic, Bustle Digital Group’s programmatic and ad tech specialist. “A standardized, transparent signal framework gives buyers clarity into inventory quality and audience context, which leads to stronger decisioning and better results.”

The global publisher boasts 115 million readers across its 10 editorial brands and has leaned into supply path optimization for nearly a decade. Its support for OpenAds follows its earlier integration of OpenPath, marking another step toward streamlining programmatic auctions.

The Trade Desk founder and CEO Jeff Green recently asserted in an op-ed for The Current that more progress was made cleaning up the digital ad supply chain in 2025 than in the previous five years combined, echoing Milojkovic thoughts.

“This is a battle between different constituents of the sell side — those companies that obfuscate and duplicate versus those that do not,” Green wrote.

Greater transparency allows buyers to better understand what they’re purchasing. And for sellers, greater transparency can provide clearer demand and pricing signals, which in turn can enable more effective yield management. “Bringing that type of clarity is critical to keeping the open internet healthy,” Bustle Digital Group’s director of programmatic solutions, Charles Thomas Wolfe, said.

This clarity also allows publishers to more accurately value their own inventory and optimize performance. With transparent auctions, publishers can independently audit and verify auctions to ensure the highest bid wins, said Dave Strauss, the Guardian’s vice president of revenue operations and strategy.

The shift comes as publishers remain wary following the Google ad tech antitrust trial, in which a federal judge ruled the company held two illegal monopolies in the online advertising stack. During the trial, Google was found to have employed tactics such as First Look and Last Look that skewed audition dynamics in its favor.

“One of the biggest challenges in programmatic is understanding where value is lost between buyers and publishers,” said Megan Hong, senior director of partner and yield management at The Arena Group, in a press release. “OpenAds brings much needed transparency to the auction, especially around fees and reseller activity.”

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