As walled gardens tighten control, ad tech’s future may hinge on cloud-powered curation—real-time, data-driven packaging that helps the open web compete.
August 2025 served as a stark reminder of the volatility inherent in ad tech. Despite tightening supply paths and pushing platform adoption, The Trade Desk’s stock slid. Then investors expressed dissatisfaction with the industry bellwether’s response to questions about competing with Amazon. The latter company, meanwhile, continued to flex its media muscle, cutting out intermediaries and reshaping how budgets will be allocated.
For buyers, publishers, and platforms focused on the open web, the signal is clear: Scale is no longer enough. The next wave of performance needs to come from cleaner, more intelligent real-time pathways between supply and demand.
It’s no wonder, then, that curation has become one of the industry’s defining trends, as players from across the programmatic landscape realize the benefits of using data and technology to filter, organize, and package inventory for performance.
Curation’s great, but, like scale, it is not enough on its own. That’s where the cloud comes in.
When curation runs on cloud-native infrastructure, it becomes a real-time system that can filter noise, handle signals, and optimize impressions in milliseconds. And in a space increasingly dominated by walled gardens, that combination could be the open internet’s best shot at keeping pace.
Why can’t packaging afford to stay static?
Traditional programmatic operated on scale above all, sending millions of impressions through the pipes. DSPs were required to handle millions of bid requests per second, many of which were duplicative or irrelevant. Deal IDs offered some relief, packaging inventory into manageable bundles. Yet, these deals were often static, fixed lists of sites or categories that could only be re-optimized after performance data had been collected.
The “burn and learn” approach is no longer sustainable. Amazon is proving the power of real-time optimization with its closed-loop transaction data, raising expectations for what performance should look like. Buyers who opt for walled gardens over the open internet can seemingly avoid waiting weeks just to see what worked, instead making decisions in milliseconds with impressions scored on quality, context, and the likelihood of outcomes.
How does the cloud make curation more dynamic?
In this environment, cloud-native curation is the open internet’s ticket to viability.
Cloud infrastructure enables the evaluation of billions of impressions in real-time, applying contextual and performance signals before they reach the DSP. The result is fewer but higher-quality bid requests, reduced QPS strain, and cleaner inputs for algorithms.
Other industry headlines further emphasize the need for this shift. Clean Tap, for example, now filters low-quality CTV inventory before buyers ever see it. At the same time, Magnite has opened direct-sold CTV deals to programmatic access, flooding new supply into the pipes. However, moves like these will deliver real performance only if they leverage cloud curation to filter out noise upstream and package only the impressions that matter.
Who benefits from real-time curation?
The impact of this shift isn’t limited to technology. Cloud-powered curation alters the flow of value across the ecosystem, yielding benefits for all participants.
- For buyers, it means campaigns that adapt continuously instead of retroactively. Impressions are filtered upstream, reducing wasted spend and accelerating ROI.
- For publishers, it means better monetization of high-quality placements (rather than broad bundles), giving them a better seat at the table.
- For DSPs, it means less strain. Lower QPS loads, reduced compute waste, and cleaner signals improve both efficiency and algorithmic accuracy.
- For programmatic as a whole, less wasted processing reduces energy consumption, while more performant supply paths help the open internet keep pace with the walled gardens.
Taken together, these benefits demonstrate why curation has evolved from a tactical tool into a strategic lever, enabling every participant in the supply chain to achieve more with less, while raising the industry’s overall quality bar.
Why cloud-powered curation is the path forward
This summer’s headlines make one thing clear: Ad tech is moving toward speed, precision, and tighter control of the supply chain. To remain competitive, the open internet requires approaches that deliver these qualities without locking buyers and publishers into closed ecosystems.
Cloud-powered curation offers that approach. It evolves the familiar practice of packaging into a real-time, performance-driven discipline. In a market where every millisecond counts, this gives the open web a way to compete on both quality and scale. For everyone who has realized that curation is the next stage of packaging, it’s time to maximize its potential on the cloud.
