The 45-Cent Dollar: Where a Brand's Ad Budget Actually Goes

A simple question with an uncomfortable answer

Ask a marketer where their media budget goes and most will point to a dashboard: impressions served, clicks, installs, conversions. Ask what share of each dollar reached the website or app that showed the ad, and the room usually goes quiet.

That silence is the problem. Between the brand and the publisher sits a long chain of intermediaries: agencies, demand-side platforms (DSPs), ad servers, verification vendors, data providers, supply-side platforms (SSPs) and exchanges. Each takes a share. Few brands can see the whole chain at once, and until 2020 nobody had measured it end to end.

The study that followed the money

In 2020 the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA) and PwC published the Programmatic Supply Chain Transparency Study. It was the first attempt anywhere to trace individual impressions from the advertiser's spend all the way to the publisher's revenue [1][2].

Its headline finding was blunt: on average, publishers received 51% of advertiser spend [1][2]. The share varied between 49% and 67% across the publishers studied, but the average told the story. For every dollar a brand put in, about half came out the other end as revenue for the publisher who actually carried the ad.

The study then broke the missing half into its parts [1]:

Where the dollar goes	Share of advertiser spend
Agency fee	7%
DSP fee	8%
Demand-side technology (ad serving, verification, data)	10%
SSP fee	8%
Supply-side technology	1%
Unattributable "unknown delta"	15%
Reaches the publisher	51%

The most striking line is the last deduction. Fifteen percent of spend, about a third of all supply-chain costs, could not be attributed to any party at all [1][2]. PwC called it the "unknown delta." It isn't necessarily fraud or theft. It's money whose destination couldn't be proven, which in a supply chain handling other people's budgets is a problem of its own.

The difficulty of the research is itself revealing. Of 267 million impressions in the sample, only 31 million, about 12%, could be matched across the chain from start to finish [1]. If an industry-funded audit struggles to follow the money, an individual brand has little chance.

From the publisher to a real user

Reaching the publisher isn't the finish line. A paid impression or install only has value if a real person saw it, and if the credit for that person's action is genuine.

Fraud sits on top of the supply-chain fees. AppsFlyer, a mobile measurement company that analyses billions of installs, estimates that fraud drains roughly 12% of digital ad spend globally [11]. Other estimates are higher: Juniper Research has put the share lost to fraud at more than 22% of global digital ad spend, around $84 billion in 2023 [16].

Using the more conservative 12% figure and applying it to the 51 cents that reaches publishers removes about 6 more cents. The chain looks like this:

• 100¢ leaves the brand
• −34¢ in agency, DSP, SSP and technology fees
• −15¢ that cannot be traced
• 51¢ reaches the publisher
• −6¢ lost to fraud (about 12% of working media)
• ≈45¢ buys a real user

This figure is a model, not a single measured number. It combines an audited fee breakdown with an industry fraud estimate. But it is a conservative model: it uses the lower fraud rate, and it doesn't count money wasted on ads that were technically real but poorly targeted, badly timed or shown to people who would have bought anyway.

Does the 2020 figure still hold?

The ISBA study is now several years old, and the industry has worked hard on transparency since. A fair question is whether the picture has improved.

It has, but not by as much as you might hope. The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) in the United States has tracked programmatic efficiency since 2023. Its first full study found that only 36% of each dollar entering a DSP effectively reached the consumer [4][5], after fees and waste such as made-for-advertising sites and invalid traffic. By its Q1 2026 benchmark, the equivalent measure, which the ANA calls true ad spend, stood at 43.3% [9].

That is real progress. It is also still below 45 cents. We cover the ANA's findings in more detail in a separate article, but the direction of travel is clear: the industry is cleaning up, and the dollar is still losing more than half its value on the way to the customer.

What 45 cents does not claim

It's worth being precise about the scope of the finding.

It applies to the intermediated chain, not to every ad dollar. Large self-serve platforms such as Meta, Google, Apple and TikTok work differently. A brand buying directly from them doesn't pay a separate DSP, SSP and exchange. Those platforms have their own issues, which we explore elsewhere, but the 55-cent leak describes the layered, resold supply chain around them.

It doesn't mean every intermediary is dishonest. Ad serving, verification and data all do real work. The problem is structural: each layer is paid as a share of the spend passing through it, so each has an incentive for more spend, not better outcomes.

It's an average. Individual supply chains in the ISBA study ranged widely, and the "unknown delta" varied from 0% to 86% [1]. Some brands with tight contracts and direct deals do far better. Many do worse.

Why this matters now

Digital advertising is no longer a line item. According to WPP Media, pure-play digital accounted for about 73% of global advertising revenue in 2025 [18], a market measured in hundreds of billions of dollars. When that much money flows through a chain that keeps more than half of it, even small improvements are worth billions.

There's also a compounding cost that doesn't appear in the waterfall. The 45 cents that survive are usually optimised for the metrics the chain is paid on (impressions, clicks, installs) rather than for what the brand needs: customers who stay and pay. A dollar that loses half its value before it's spent, and is then optimised for the wrong goal, is working even less hard than 45 cents suggests.

Three questions every brand should ask

1. What share of my spend reaches the publisher? If your agency or platform partner can't answer, that is itself an answer.
2. Who in my chain is paid on outcomes rather than spend? In most chains the honest answer is nobody.
3. How much of my attributed performance is real? Fraud and misattribution inflate results. Independent measurement is the only defence.

The takeaway

The 45-cent dollar isn't a slogan. It's what you get when you combine the only audited end-to-end study of the programmatic supply chain with a conservative estimate of fraud. The exact number will vary by brand and channel, but the shape is consistent: most of the dollar is consumed before it reaches a real customer.

The fix isn't another intermediary. It is shortening the chain and paying for outcomes rather than volume.

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References

[1] ISBA / PwC. Programmatic Supply Chain Transparency Study, executive summary. December 2020. https://www.isba.org.uk/system/files/media/documents/2020-12/executive-summary-programmatic-supply-chain-transparency-study.pdf

[2] ISBA. Time for change and transparency in programmatic advertising. May 2020. https://www.isba.org.uk/article/time-change-and-transparency-programmatic-advertising

[4] ANA. Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study: complete report. December 2023. https://www.ana.net/content/show/id/83522

[5] ANA. Programmatic transparency hub. https://www.ana.net/content/show/id/programmatic-transparency

[9] ANA / TAG TrustNet. Programmatic Transparency Benchmark: Q1 2026. May 2026. https://www.ana.net/content/show/id/pr-2026-05-programmatic

[11] AppsFlyer. Ad fraud data insights. April 2026. https://www.appsflyer.com/blog/measurement-analytics/ad-fraud-data-insights/

[16] Search Engine Land (citing Juniper Research). $84 billion lost to ad fraud: what you missed about affiliate abuse in 2025. June 2025. https://searchengineland.com/84-billion-lost-to-ad-fraud-what-you-missed-about-affiliate-abuse-in-2025-456530

[18] WPP Media. This Year Next Year: Midyear 2025. June 2025. https://www.wppmedia.com/thought-leadership/this-year-next-year/tyny-midyear-2025-research