One of the most common strategic questions from publishers: should I sell through direct deals or open RTB? The answer is both, strategically. Having managed both channels at Glance scaling to $200M+ and now designing exchange products at InMobi, here is how I think about it.
The Transaction Spectrum
Open RTB is fully automated — any buyer can bid. PMPs add access control with negotiated minimums. Preferred Deals add price certainty with single-buyer first-look. Programmatic Guaranteed adds volume certainty with fixed impressions. Traditional IO is fully manual. Each trades automation for control; the optimal mix depends on inventory characteristics and demand composition.
When RTB Wins
RTB excels when demand is competitive and the objective is yield maximization. For mid-tier web publishers with diversified traffic, open RTB through header bidding (InMobi Exchange, Magnite, PubMatic, Index Exchange) generates highest eCPM because maximum competition drives prices up. RTB is also ideal for long-tail inventory where deal overhead is not justified. At Glance, RTB through unified auction consistently outperformed manually negotiated deals for standard display.
When Deals Win
Premium inventory with limited supply commands a premium through guaranteed deals. Brand advertisers requiring certainty for tentpole campaigns prefer PG. Buyers wanting publisher first-party data targeting prefer PMPs. Publishers using deals strategically generate 15-25% more total revenue than those relying exclusively on either approach.
The Optimal Mix
Best publishers use layered approach: PG captures brand budget on premium placements, Preferred Deals capture strategic buyers, PMPs create curated marketplaces, open RTB fills remaining through maximum competition. At InMobi, our exchange supports this full spectrum with configurable priority rules.
The Future: Blended Transactions
The distinction is blurring. Curated deals, always-on PMPs functioning like open auction with quality guarantees, and AI-negotiated terms create hybrids. Exchanges embracing this complexity — rather than forcing rigid deal types — will win. At InMobi, this is where we invest: flexible deal products adapting to how buyers and sellers actually transact.
Building Toward the Future
At InMobi, where I lead Web and CTV Exchange product strategy, every aspect of this topic connects to our exchange product roadmap. The decisions we make about auction design, signal enrichment, demand routing, and yield optimization are all informed by deep understanding of these fundamentals. Having built monetization systems scaling to $200M+ at Glance, I know that getting the basics right compounds into massive revenue impact at scale.
The programmatic industry is evolving toward AI-native, server-side, cross-surface architecture. By 2030, exchanges will consolidate, AI agents will participate in auctions, attention-based signals will supplement viewability, and CTV will be the dominant ad surface. The product builders who understand today's fundamentals deeply — and invest in building for tomorrow's requirements — will lead this transformation. That is exactly what I am doing at InMobi and at adsgupta.com, where I am building AI-powered advertising intelligence tools drawing on everything I have learned across Google, Automatad, Glance, and InMobi over the past decade.
If you are building in programmatic advertising, I encourage you to go beyond surface-level understanding. Read the OpenRTB specification. Study bid request logs. Analyze auction dynamics. Trace the supply chain from publisher to advertiser. This depth of understanding is what separates good ad products from great ones — and it is the perspective I bring to everything I build.