Marketplace
Why traffic quality matters more than quantity
The next phase of AdTech will be defined by who sends the most useful traffic, not who sends the most.
Product leader · PubMatic
Notes on AdTech, AI, and the marketplaces that move the open internet.
I'm Ashish Kumar, a product leader focused on monetization, supply-chain efficiency, traffic quality, and AI-driven decisioning across the programmatic ecosystem. I write here about how marketplaces, infrastructure, and machine learning quietly shape what the open internet earns.
Featured essays
All essays →- 3 min read →
- Coming soon
Infrastructure
Shaping inbound traffic at scale
Why traffic quality is a product surface, not a back-office cleanup job.
- Coming soon
Economics
QPS, cost, and the economics of an exchange
How DSP QPS management quietly decides who wins the auction.
Recent thinking
Drafts in progress- Coming soon
Career
From SSP to DSP and back
Notes from a decade on both sides of the programmatic stack.
- Coming soon
Product
PMP optimization with buyer-led KPIs
Designing private marketplace products around outcomes, not access.
- Coming soon
AI
AI-native decisioning in the open auction
What changes when models, not rules, run the exchange.
Working thesis
Programmatic advertising is moving from pipes and workflows to outcome-driven infrastructure. The next generation of AdTech will optimize for measurable buyer outcomes, supply-chain efficiency, signal quality, and AI-native decisioning, not just bid density or impression volume.
13+ yrs
In AdTech across PubMatic, Amazon Ads, and Exponential
$250M
Google Open Bidding spend scaled from zero
6.6×
Mobile app monetization grown ($30M → $200M)
Got a hard product problem worth solving?
I'm open to thoughtful conversations on AdTech, monetization, AI, and the future of programmatic infrastructure.