Bid shading is asymmetric and you're absorbing it

Bid shading is asymmetric and you're absorbing it
Watching: in first-price auctions, DSP-side bid shading trims what buyers pay, but if your SSP also runs a soft floor + shading on its end, the spread gets split twice — once toward the buyer, once into the SSP fee. Your clearing price sits well below the highest bid submitted.
— Request gross bid vs net cleared in log-level data
— A consistent wide gap = shading stacked against your floor
Impact: double shading quietly compresses publisher yield. Confidence: sourced.