Two publishers. One sells through 12 partners, the other through 200. Which has the better supply? Most people guess the big one. They are usually wrong, and the whole Bidcliq Academy score exists to show why.
Bidcliq Academy reads a publisher on two separate axes: quality (how clean and transparent the declared supply is) and quantity (how much of it there is, and how bloated). The core insight of the product is that more partners is not better. Clean directness is.
Key idea
A publisher lands in one of four quadrants: lean and clean (few partners, authorized, mostly direct), big but healthy (many partners but clean), sparse (thin and unproven), or bloated and opaque (many partners, lots of unauthorized, reseller, or unresolved lines).
The six quality components
| Component | Points | What it rewards |
|---|---|---|
| Authorized sellers | 30 | Share of verifiable lines where reciprocity holds (the account is a seller_id). |
| Direct vs reseller | 20 | More DIRECT lines, so shorter paths. |
| Account-type integrity | 15 | DIRECT/RESELLER agrees with PUBLISHER/INTERMEDIARY; penalizes type mismatches. |
| Transparency | 15 | Non-confidential, non-passthrough sellers, so the path is visible. |
| Declaration density | 10 | How much of the declared supply actually resolved. |
| Supply-path simplicity | 10 | Fewer inferred hops. |
Those sum to 100 for the quality axis. The quantity axis is separate: line count, unique SSP count, and bloat. A clean 12-line publisher and a clean 200-line publisher can both score high on quality but sit far apart on quantity.
The subtle part: NEUTRAL and penalties
Key idea
A line whose SSP could not be resolved (no sellers.json, fetch failed) is not counted as authorized or unauthorized. It scores NEUTRAL (0.5), because absence of proof is not proof of fraud. That is why an all-unresolved publisher scores around 50, not 0 and not 100. Penalties apply to genuine problems (unauthorized lines, type mismatches, duplicates), never to merely unverifiable ones.
Quick check
A publisher’s SSPs all fail to return a sellers.json, so nothing can be verified. Does it score near 0, near 50, or near 100? Why?
Reading a grade
- 90% authorized, mostly DIRECT, no confidentials, low hops: high quality, modest quantity, lean and clean, A or B.
- 200 lines, 40% unauthorized, many resellers: high quantity, low quality, bloated and opaque, F.
- The biggest lever is authorized sellers (30 points). Fixing unauthorized lines (get the account listed in the SSP’s sellers.json, or remove the line) moves the score most.
Note
Read a real ScoreBreakdown and quadrant in a live report, then rank several publishers against each other on Compare.