The Daisy Chain Gang: How CTV’s SSP Coalition Turned Ad-Funded TV Into Loose Change

By Ad-Tech Informer

Welcome to the glamorous world of Connected TV (CTV) programmatic advertising—where billion-dollar brands pump cash into shiny digital ad campaigns, only for that money to mysteriously vanish down a black hole of “ad-tech innovation”. Spoiler: it’s not vanishing. It’s being carefully siphoned, link by link, through a conga line of Supply-Side Platforms (SSPs) playing pass-the-parcel with your ad dollars.

This delightful scam is called daisy-chaining. Think of it as a relay race—except instead of passing a baton, each SSP passes along your ad call, takes a 20% cut, then smirks while the next one does the same. By the time the ad actually hits a TV screen, broadcasters, platforms, and content owners are left with—wait for it—less than 9% of the original sales rate. That’s not a “margin.” That’s daylight robbery disguised as programmatic plumbing.

Some publishers are now scraping under $5 CPM, and in the most laughably tragic cases, $1 CPM. That’s pocket change. That’s “go buy yourself half a coffee and don’t ask for oat milk” money. At that point, ad-funded CTV monetization isn’t a business model—it’s a charity drive for SSP middlemen.

The SSP Cartel: Morals Not Included

Let’s not sugarcoat it. This is a cartel. A clique. A secret garden of opportunistic, morally allergic middle layers, all pretending they’re “adding value” while really just adding invoices. Each link in the daisy chain fattens their commission while starving the very people making the content—the creators and broadcasters. The real heroes of TV are left with crumbs while the dozen ad-tech “partners” are stuffing themselves from the cookie jar.

And if you think it stops there, oh no—welcome to the Hop Olympics. Every ad call doesn’t just make one polite request. Nope. It bounces around 10, 12, sometimes nearly 100 times with slightly tweaked data like a toddler insisting “but THIS time it’s different.” Each hop racks up fees—$0.25 CPM per hop, on average. Multiply that by 10, and the daisy chain is pocketing several dollars in tolls before the broadcaster even sees their pathetic $1–$2.

From Sitcoms to Gas Stations: The Great Data Scam

It gets better. The daisy chain is also a master illusionist. Advertisers are told their campaign is running on a premium CTV device during an episode of Friends. Reality? That same ad is showing up on a screen in a convenience store, shoved next to TikTok reuploads. Confidence in the data is so low it’s practically underground, and DSPs like The Trade Desk are effectively trading against glorified guesswork passed through insecure VAST tags.

Enter View TV: The Buzzkill at the SSP Party

Of course, every scam eventually gets a whistleblower. Enter Jamie Branson of View TV, the guy who walked into the smoky backroom of ad-tech and flipped the lights on. Branson’s team discovered the racket while doing due diligence on an SSP acquisition. After combing through two years of transactions, they found four major scams:

1. Fake Bundle IDs with apps that had fewer downloads than your grandma’s Sudoku app.
2. Ad calls brute-forced 100 times per pod slot with tiny data tweaks.
3. Misrepresented data turning sitcom audiences into convenience-store passerby.
4. The entire ecosystem built on opaqueness so thick you’d need night-vision goggles to see through it.

The YouTube Comparison: Two Hops, One Model That Works

Branson’s take? Compare the daisy-chain disaster to YouTube. Love or hate it, YouTube works because it’s a two-hop walled garden: Google Ads + YouTube. No daisy chain. No snake pit of commissions. Creators get one-third of gross revenue, no hidden tech fees, and—shock horror—they actually focus on making content. Revolutionary, right?

Enter ONE SSP: The Chain Breaker

So what’s the antidote? Branson and View TV launched ONE SSP (Open Network Exchange)—a publisher consortium-built SSP designed to kill off the daisy chain model. ONE SSP promises:

• Broadcast-grade ad-tech stack with SSAI and CDN baked in.
• Transparent reporting, 28-day payments, and 100% ad-fill.
• Commission of just 15% (not 20% per hop).
• A boardroom seat for publishers and broadcasters to keep the system honest.
• OOH screens with real-time EYEBALLSz measurement instead of sketchy invoice multipliers.
• Delivering $10CPM to $40CPM averages regularly

For once, an SSP isn’t trying to squeeze blood out of content libraries—it’s giving them a sustainable, transparent business model. In other words: ONE SSP might actually make ad-funded CTV worth doing again.

👉 If you’re sick of daisy-chain nonsense, you might want to drop a line to the ONE SSP team at onessp.com or email excited@onessp.com before your CPMs drop below “gum money.”