Amazon Publisher Services (APS) will remove dataxu from its Fire TV third-party DSP service, according to sources with knowledge of the change.
APS opened its Fire TV inventory to third-party DSPs for the first time five months ago with integrations with The Trade Desk and dataxu. Less than two months after dataxu was acquired by Roku, it is slated to be removed from Amazon’s program.
Amazon did not respond to request to comment. Roku and dataxu declined to comment.
When APS released its Fire TV DSP partnerships in July, Jeff Green and Mike Baker, CEOs of The Trade Desk and dataxu, respectively, hailed the product as a potential game changer in programmatic video.
SSPs owned by broadcasters, like Comcast’s FreeWheel and AT&T’s Xandr division, have addressable TV inventory, but don’t auction impressions in real time.
And streaming services like Hulu and YouTube strictly control their advertising IDs so users can’t be profiled or tracked across other channels. Those platforms also reserve top-shelf inventory for their own media services.
Amazon, to an extent, is similar since its media properties like Prime, Twitch and IMDb TV aren’t in the Fire TV inventory program. But the Fire TV partnership allows third-party DSPs to bid against the rest of the inventory controlled by Amazon, since the company takes a cut of up to 30% of all ad impressions from OTT publishers in its Fire TV ecosystem (except for YouTube).
Those third-party DSPs, now just The Trade Desk, can bid on even terms with Amazon’s own DSP, and they can use their own deal IDs. So The Trade Desk can use its cookie-based Unified ID solution to target Fire TV impressions, and use the data for frequency capping and measurement across other video suppliers. That’s a huge differentiator from most other major addressable video platforms, except for Roku, which owns dataxu.
Which, of course, is the problem.
This year, Fire TV pulled nearly even with Roku as the top OTT platform in terms of US household penetration. Roku and Fire TV control the most programmatic video inventory, aside from YouTube, which channels deal IDs and media buys through Ads Data Hub, Google’s analytics service, and its Display & Video 360 DSP.
Roku told AdExchanger after it acquired dataxu that it plans to keep its inventory marketplace open to third-party DSPs and to maintain dataxu’s ecosystem approach with an open advertising ID.
“Being an open ecosystem is essential to how we operate here,” said Roku SVP and ad platform GM Scott Rosenberg at the time. “It’s both good to the ecosystem and good business.”
For now, that ecosystem closed a little more.
Amazon did not say whether it will allow other third-party DSPs besides The Trade Desk access to Fire TV inventory. Nor did it say how other DSPs could be considered for the service.
Removing dataxu will leave the Amazon DSP and The Trade Desk as the only programmatic buying platforms with access to Amazon’s share of Fire TV inventory, one of the largest and most lucrative pools of CTV supply.
