The story. There is no right number of SSPs for a publisher; the useful question is whether each one earns its place. At The New York Times, Courtney Glaze, VP of revenue operations, says every ad tech partner has to, and describes the search as “partners rather than incremental transactions”. (AdExchanger Talks, Value Over Volume, With NYT’s Courtney Glaze, 6 October 2026)
01What happened
- The test. Glaze says the Times asks whether demand and tools are duplicative or incremental, whether they integrate cleanly with the rest of the stack, and whether the value justifies “the tax”, meaning both the cost and the operational burden.
- The history. The Times pulled open programmatic from its mobile app in 2019 over load times and reader experience, and brought it back in 2024 on more controlled terms. When Glaze joined from Vox Media shortly after, the company had a short list of demand partners with limited access to its portfolio.
- How it has grown. The partner list has grown since, “but only very selectively”. One example is an agreement earlier this year to use Magnite as its preferred SSP for in-app private marketplace deals.
- The yardstick. Glaze says the Times measures return on more than advertising yield: subscriber acquisition, lifetime value, audience development and the reader experience all count.
- The consequence. That shapes when to lean on open market demand and when to go direct or build a PMP. “It’s not demand for demand’s sake,” Glaze says, while insisting the Times does not leave revenue on the table casually.
02What it means inside a GAM network
The reflex Glaze describes, adding SSPs like insurance, usually shows up in Google Ad Manager as another set of bidders in Prebid or another yield group. More partners can mean more competition for each impression, but every added partner also brings its own integration to maintain, its own latency and its own reporting to reconcile. Glaze’s phrase, the “tax”, is a good name for that cost.
We should be clear about the limit of the evidence. This is one publisher’s account in a podcast interview. It does not say how many SSPs the Times runs, and it does not say that fewer partners earn more. The Times is also a subscription business, so subscribers sit in its yardstick in a way they will not for most ad-supported sites. What carries over is the method: judge each partner on what it adds that the others do not.
The Times answers the SSP question with a test rather than a number.
03What publishers should do about it
04The bottom line
The Times answers the SSP question with a test rather than a number. Run the same test on your own stack: a partner that is duplicative, hard to integrate or not worth its operational cost is a candidate to cut, however much demand it promises.