The Guardian lifts programmatic revenue 21% by pruning its own supply path

The Guardian grew revenue from programmatic advertising 21% in a year after launching Curation at Scale in September 2025, a project that simplified how its inventory is bought and sold and cut unsold inventory by around 54% year on year in the three months to March 2026. Head of digital optimisation Duane Thompson diagnosed the problem as "too many middlemen sat between the advertiser and ourselves", and the fix was to audit which companies were authorised to sell the inventory, introduce more direct payment routes, share privacy-safe audience signals and flatten hundreds of inconsistent pricing rules in Google Ad Manager. "If you think of a shop with a really excellent product but unclear labels, several middlemen and different prices at all of those tills, the product itself still has not lost its quality, but the actual experience makes it harder for the market to value it correctly," Thompson said. Global chief advertising officer Imogen Fox tied the work to the group's journalism: "We have a high-quality context, a high-value environment, and if you don't get your setup right, then your inventory can become devalued." The project won the Future of Media Awards 2026, but Thompson is careful to say it is not a template others can copy wholesale.

The crux

The Guardian's 21% yield gain came not from new demand but from supply-path hygiene, a concrete proof that removing intermediaries and fixing signals is the fastest lever on publisher revenue in a market where only a fraction of every programmatic dollar reaches the publisher.

Sell-side read

Thompson's own advice is the playbook: map the route from advertiser to publisher, take ownership of the audience and contextual signals you already hold, and remove every intermediary that is not adding value. The 54% unsold-inventory cut is the number to benchmark against your own stack.

Watch

whether other news publishers replicate the "fewer, cleaner routes" model, and whether Google Ad Manager's agentic pricing changes undercut or amplify the gains Curation at Scale delivered.