The Trade Desk launches OpenSincera for greater ad transparency

The Trade Desk has announced OpenSincera, a new application that provides the advertising industry with rich advertising metadata to reveal deeper insights on advertising quality and the health of the digital advertising supply chain. The May 13, 2025 announcement represents a significant move toward increased transparency in the programmatic advertising ecosystem.

OpenSincera is a free platform that will provide metrics on the ad experience such as ads-to-content ratio, page weight, average ads-in-view, and ad refresh rate. The application will be available to all participants across the entire advertising industry, including The Trade Desk's competitors, starting June 6, 2025 at open.sincera.io.

The announcement comes about four months after The Trade Desk acquired Sincera in January 2025. Sincera, founded in 2021, specializes in analyzing publisher data quality through a fleet of synthetic users that simulate real-world consumer behavior. The company's technology examines complex interactions between privacy settings, real-time bidding, and user identity to provide detailed insights into advertising technology deployment.

"Sincera has arguably the industry's richest, most unique data on digital advertising supply chains," said Jeff Green, Founder and CEO of The Trade Desk. "We are embedding the full scope of that data across our Kokai platform so our clients can have as much information as possible on what they are bidding on. But with OpenSincera, we are opening much of this data to anyone in the industry that has an interest in improving the health of digital advertising, including our competitors."

How OpenSincera works

A key feature of OpenSincera will be a first-of-its-kind API service that will enable ad tech companies to build services based on the data easily and intuitively. This API provides a live feed of data that can be synced with programmatic technology.

According to Mike O'Sullivan, GM, Product at The Trade Desk, "Making OpenSincera available to everyone was critical for us to help improve the health of the advertising supply chain. We're opening the door for everyone who wants to make advertising more transparent and efficient. The more data we can put into the hands of everyone in the advertising ecosystem the better it is for everyone and the open internet."

O'Sullivan, who was Sincera's co-founder and CEO, told AdExchanger, "We started working on it as soon as we joined The Trade Desk," adding that it could be a "crown jewel" for the team, in terms of information that the startup is able to provide to the entire ad ecosystem.

Benefits for different stakeholders

OpenSincera is designed to be useful for various participants in the advertising ecosystem:

• Agencies could use it to maintain and update blocklists
• Publishers can understand how their own sites appear from the buy-side perspective
• DSPs and ad tech companies can use the API for custom bidding algorithms
• Advertisers gain better visibility into ad placements and performance metrics

"I have a lot of sympathy for publishers, because it's not easy to understand the implications of a lot of these decisions," O'Sullivan told AdExchanger. "Can you look at a square ad on a page and understand how many supply paths are connected to and bidding on it?"

The initiative addresses a real knowledge gap. O'Sullivan shared that Sincera has spoken with publishers who believed they imposed a 30-second ad refresh minimum, but it turned out a vendor or ad overlay on the page was refreshing every 10 seconds – a discrepancy that could significantly impact user experience and publisher revenue.

Enhanced capabilities after acquisition

The acquisition has dramatically enhanced Sincera's capabilities by giving it access to The Trade Desk's vast pool of campaign data. O'Sullivan explained that while Sincera previously worked with enterprise customers, they were "always a little bit at arm's length" in those relationships. Under The Trade Desk, what was once a trickle of advertiser data has turned into a firehose.

Even in the short time since the acquisition, Sincera has been able to improve what it formerly thought of as a "Goldilocks zone," according to O'Sullivan. The company knew that metrics like ad impressions to content and minimum ad refresh rates were "lighthouse metrics," but after incorporating results from The Trade Desk, they can now clarify exactly how those metrics affect CPMs and campaign attribution.

The announcement also comes one day before Microsoft announced its decision to shutdown its Xandr Invest DSP (formerly AppNexus) by February 2026. AppNexus had established itself as one of the most transparent options in the programmatic ecosystem, providing advertisers with unprecedented visibility into fee structures and money flows throughout the advertising supply chain. The loss of Xandr as a transparent option may further accelerate industry efforts to establish clearer standards for fee disclosure.

Against this backdrop, OpenSincera's launch represents a significant step toward greater transparency and potentially fills an important gap in the ecosystem. As O'Sullivan noted, if open programmatic improves overall, it "starts to turn the tide in ensuring that the open internet gets a proportional representation of ad spend. Whereas today the walled gardens get a disproportional amount of investment versus the amount of time users are spending on those properties."

Why this matters

The introduction of OpenSincera has significant implications for the marketing community for several key reasons:

1. Increased transparency: Marketers gain better visibility into the complex programmatic supply chain, allowing them to make more informed decisions about their advertising investments.
2. Better budget allocation: With clearer insights into metrics like ads-to-content ratio and ad refresh rates, marketers can optimize their spending and ensure more of their budget reaches quality publishers.
3. Improved ad quality: Access to standardized metrics across the industry could lead to better overall ad experiences, benefiting both consumers and advertisers.
4. Level playing field: By democratizing access to this data, The Trade Desk is potentially helping to create more equal competition among different players in the ecosystem.
5. Counter to walled gardens: The initiative aims to strengthen the open internet as an alternative to closed platforms, potentially giving marketers more diverse and transparent options for their campaigns.

When The Trade Desk announced its agreement to acquire Sincera in January 2025, Jeff Green explained that "Sincera helps advertisers understand the quality of data provided by publishers and content providers, and in doing so, enables advertisers to value ad impressions more accurately. As the number of digital advertising channels proliferates, and as the range of advertising data sources expands, Sincera's objective data insights become increasingly valuable for advertisers looking to optimize campaign investments."

The deal, estimated by market analysts to be worth between $25 million and $30 million, came just three months after Sincera had received $4.2 million in seed funding. This relatively quick acquisition highlights the strategic value The Trade Desk saw in Sincera's technology and approach.

Mike O'Sullivan emphasized Sincera's commitment to objectivity at the time of the acquisition: "Sincera has become the go-to resource for advertisers and publishers looking for objective data on advertising value. We have retained that objectivity by ensuring our focus on being an expert data company, rather than a data provider."

Tools like OpenSincera could play a crucial role in establishing more standardized assessment frameworks that benefit the entire ecosystem. The initiative aligns with growing industry trends toward greater accountability, transparency, and quality in programmatic advertising.

With OpenSincera scheduled to launch on June 6, 2025, it will be interesting to see how different stakeholders in the advertising ecosystem adopt and integrate the platform into their workflows and decision-making processes. The impact could be particularly significant for publishers and advertisers who have been seeking greater transparency in their programmatic transactions.

Timeline

• January 15, 2025: The Trade Desk announces agreement to acquire Sincera
• Q1 2025: Acquisition of Sincera closes (valued at approximately $25-30 million)
• May 13, 2025: The Trade Desk announces OpenSincera
• May 14, 2025: Microsoft announces it will sunset Xandr DSP by February 2026
• June 6, 2025: OpenSincera scheduled to launch at open.sincera.io

Related developments in ad tech

• May 14, 2025: Microsoft to sunset Xandr DSP - Loss of AppNexus's transparent platform leaves advertisers with fewer options for fee visibility in ad tech ecosystem
• May 12, 2025: PubMatic and Magnite battle for ad tech dominance - Financial reports reveal strengths and challenges for leading supply-side platforms
• May 12, 2025: PubMatic reports revenue decline in Q1 2025, but CTV growth exceeds 50% - Ad tech firm's underlying business grows despite shifting digital advertising landscape
• May 11, 2025: Google unveils new CTV strategies at IAB NewFronts - Google announced major updates to Display & Video 360 platform with AI integration