Imagine sending someone $1,000 via PayPal.
The money goes through. But you’re charged another $500 just to see the receipt.
You’d be rightfully shocked, wondering what the second charge is for.
This is the current verification model. You pay once for prebid controls and then again for reporting. Advertisers shouldn’t have to pay for basic proof that the transaction worked. How did we end up here?
Why buyers are paying twice for verification
The verification industry has turned prevention and proof into two separate revenue streams.
For the largest verification players, post-bid measurement accounts for roughly 33% to 40% of reported revenue. This is in addition to substantial revenue from pre-bid services.
Inside major buying platforms, third-party verification services appear as additional fees set by the verification provider. Those prices can also change independently of the underlying media cost.
None of this is a secret, but that doesn’t make it sensible. Independent measurement, advanced analytics, attribution, and research have value. But basic reporting that shows whether a vendor’s own controls worked should come with those controls. It’s proof the service was delivered—not a second product.
The visibility gaps in pre-bid verification
The pricing model becomes even harder to defend when a prebid designed for one environment (like the web) is applied to another (like CTV).
Web verification was built around pages: crawl the text, inspect the URL, compare it with keyword and category rules. CTV has no page to scan and often comes with incomplete program metadata passed through a chain of platforms.
Buyers can pay for prebid without realizing how little information is available about the impression. For example, major DSP documentation shows some third-party verification controls available on the web are restricted in CTV or unavailable in environments like audio.
If a verification company’s reporting doesn’t identify the programs where ads appeared, what exactly is it verifying?
Consider Peer39’s research into CTV verification, which found Sensitive Content in 23.2% of open-exchange impressions versus roughly 6.5% of impressions carrying authenticated program-level signals. User-generated content (UGC) appeared in 5.33% of open-exchange impressions versus 0.03% of impressions with authenticated signals. Separately, 3.8% showed direct evidence of invalid traffic, while another 10.7% could not be confirmed as valid or invalid.
Hardly a minor reporting discrepancy, these stats represent a major difference in what the system actually knows. Before procurement debates the price of verification, it should verify what the efficacy of the product really is.
Most verification vendors are selling the same basics
This visibility gap also changes what buyers should expect from verification. Fraud protection, brand-suitability controls, and viewability remain important, but they’re now standard capabilities offered across the market. Delivering these basic capabilities is no longer enough to govern media effectively.
Buyers shouldn’t pay premium prices simply because a vendor can clear the minimum bar of “safe, human, and viewable.” Accreditation and distribution still matter, but differentiation should come from what a vendor can see, what it catches that others miss, and whether its signals improve the next media decision.
Buyers need to understand more than whether an impression cleared a basic verification threshold. They need to know where they’re getting quality and value, how much attention their ads receive, and how those signals connect to performance across CTV, social, and the open web.
Instead, advertisers end up paying the adtech tax of verification fees, measurement fees, platform charges, and internal reconciliation costs against the same campaign. This is adtech fee duplication at its worst, shrinking working media and sapping performance.
Verification vendors helped build an essential category. But as the industry matures, capabilities that have become table stakes shouldn’t continue commanding premium pricing.
Procurement should put more dollars into working media
These overlapping fees and gaps in verification give procurement teams a clear place to start: examining the total cost, not simply the headline rate. What are we paying for activation, measurement, reporting, data, and platform access? Are multiple fees being assessed against the same impression? Is basic reporting included? How much inventory is authenticated, inferred, unmeasurable, or unseen?
Then run a bake-off. Apply competing products to the same inventory and compare what each identifies. Ask vendors to disclose what they classified and what they couldn’t classify. Calculate how much each option takes out of the working media and what the buyer receives in return. Then determine where those dollars could work harder.
A polished score isn’t enough. A campaign can appear 97% safe while the vendor leaves buyers guessing about how much inventory it genuinely evaluated. “We didn’t find a problem” and “we couldn’t see enough to know” are two different conclusions.
The goal for procurement should be straightforward: pay for intelligence that improves the buy, eliminate unnecessary costs, and put more of the budget back into working media.
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Mario Diez is CEO of Peer39. Since taking the helm in 2019, he’s grown the company into an independent leader in contextual suitability, verification, and media quality, trusted by tens of thousands of advertisers and agencies worldwide.