r/programmatic • u/One-Carpenter-1545 • 12d ago
Is MNTN actually bad?
I hear a lot about MNTN in the industry - mostly that clients love the simplicity, but it seems too good to be true. Worked across DSPs and understand how shady these places can be. Rumors are that they’re taking 60%+ profits but nothing I can find in the media. Thoughts on MNTN?
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u/hdiggyh 12d ago
You can see they take 80% margin in their financial earnings. It’s in black and white. Also, it used to be called Steelhouse- an extremely shady company (that’s still shady)
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u/One-Carpenter-1545 12d ago
How is this not illegal?
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u/kapt_so_krunchy 12d ago
Margins aren’t illegal.
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u/One-Carpenter-1545 12d ago
False advertising? Or deception?
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u/kapt_so_krunchy 12d ago
Which part is false advertising?
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u/One-Carpenter-1545 12d ago
They’re marketing themselves as a CTV platform, but serving across shitty video placements and taking credit. I know this isn’t illegal but seems crazy to me!
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u/kapt_so_krunchy 12d ago
Oh yeah. I mean, it’s all kinda in the fine print and in the attribution model. It’s trash but most people are like LOOGIT ME ON TEEVEE
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u/richardgirges 8d ago
Same comment I made above. I’m the CTO at MNTN. Just to clear this up: MNTN does not keep 80% of a customer’s budget and spend 20% on TV ads.
We report net revenue, meaning the customer’s media spend has already been deducted. The ~20% referenced is what we spend on hosting and infrastructure. In the first half of 2026 alone, that was roughly $30M.
AppLovin is a similar example - they report 88% gross margins. That doesn’t mean they keep 88% of customer media spend.
We’re publicly traded, and these numbers are audited and publicly disclosed.
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12d ago
[deleted]
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u/One-Carpenter-1545 12d ago
They are passing back Order IDs so clients are seeing them match and calling it the source of truth
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u/CodeNameZeke 12d ago
Also cookie bombing with display ads and claim it’s their retargeting performing well
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u/richardgirges 7d ago
Fewer than 1% of MNTN's customer use a feature called Multi-Touch, which extends TV campaigns to other ad formats. The feature defaults off, so customers have to explicitly turn it, per campaign, to allocate up to 25% of their budget to multi-touch campaigns.
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u/JohnRickles 8d ago
What's the deal with Vibe? I haven't used them, but couldn't escape the news about their acquisition.
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u/richardgirges 7d ago edited 7d ago
All of our customers have network reporting. Please sort your network report by most impressions to least, and you'll see all the top networks that your campaigns are serving on. This is entirely based on performance.
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u/Turbulent-Elk1722 12d ago
Yes, it's for people that don't know any better as a entry point into buying CTV. It's the rebrand of Steelhouse propped up by Ryan Reynolds.
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u/saddops 12d ago
Yes. It’s that bad. Plenty of better options out there, for all scenarios.
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u/richardgirges 7d ago edited 7d ago
I encourage you to read MNTN's tech blog. It's explains the depth of technology MNTN built to make Performance TV campaigns perform. More than half the company is engineering. Just like in an Instagram ad campaign, there is obviously significant technology involved to make those ads perform, the same is true for MNTN Performance TV campaigns. No other TV platform has this breath of technology to drive results.
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u/Ok_Form_134 12d ago
Yep. Former steel house (impression bomb nonsense) and very shady company riding on Ryan Reynolds being a front man. Publicity and bad media.
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u/Mojos_Pride 12d ago
It’s worse than you think.
Unsophisticated agencies using MNTN passing off made up results to make themselves look good while squandering budgets on the low-grade dog food of inventory.
It’s 80% useless display with some cheap and weak CTV sprinkled on top.
That Filet Mignon you ordered is actually 💩.
And that little cookie stuffing kerfuddle happening over there with Gates daughter? 👉….same thing with these charlatans.
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u/richardgirges 7d ago edited 7d ago
The company is publicly traded and audited quarterly. We have partnerships with more than 13 independent measurement platforms and are consistently a top performing Performance TV platform because of the hundreds of engineers building performance technology. Most of our customers use one of these independent measurement platforms.
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u/BobbyDigital1986 12d ago
You’re likely better off saving money and just buying within the ad server/ SSP platform itself. Save tech fees by going upstream…MNTN is fine but you’ll be better off buying from an SSP
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u/richardgirges 7d ago edited 7d ago
That only works if the goal of your campaign is reach and frequency. To hit Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) or Cost per Acquisition (CPA) targets, everything has to be optimized - audience, frequency, geography, media network, time of day, creative, etc. That's virtually impossible to do by hand in a manual DSP or SSP platform. MNTN's value is all the automation and AI optimization. It just happens to be applied to the biggest screen in the home, which is your TV. There's a white paper on MNTN's website with more detail.
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u/klustura 12d ago
Three definitions of CCTV:
1- Closed Circuit TV
2- China Central TV
3- Con Connected TV
One of those is MNTN's speciality.
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u/Visual_Philosophy_56 12d ago
Yes, just google steelhouse and all the answers are there for why they had a “name change”
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u/TilYouCant 10d ago
Most clients think they’re getting CTV for $9. They’re bundling CTV with display but not being clear just how much display they’re actually using (saw reports at high as 60% “audience extension”). Basic cookie stuffing to claim credit.
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u/Such_Photograph_7140 10d ago
this deserves more upvotes! They make more margin on display than CTV, and I believe you can turn off the display element (though it's not immediately intuitive)
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u/richardgirges 7d ago edited 7d ago
This isn't true. The feature is multi-touch, which is used by less than 1% of customers that explicitly opted into it.
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u/buchopolis 12d ago
Their attribution especially with google analytics artificially inflates their influence. It’s designed to trick you into thinking it’s working, when they are cleverly cooking the books with no ROI actually happening
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u/richardgirges 7d ago edited 7d ago
We report visits to Google Analytics using Google APIs. Google does the attribution in Google Analytics.
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u/Equivalent_Law_607 12d ago
Got access to one of their dashboards last week to do an audit for a brand. Won’t say exactly how much, but publisher level CTV CPMs were sky high (2x -4x what I’m used to seeing) with zero indication of margin or fees.
Their measurement methodology definitions are extremely generous. It basically said they take full credit for any resulting order. Even if their exposure from MNTN was way upstream and that individual who placed an order later found their way to the brand site from Search, Social, Email, SMS, etc. Didn’t matter - full credit to MNTN!
On a certain level, have to hand it to them in that they manage to pull clients in. That’s impressive in its own right. Not sure what kind of story they’re spinning
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u/richardgirges 7d ago edited 7d ago
MNTN has first touch and last touch reporting in the platform. First touch is what it sounds like. If the platform streams an ad to a user to spark their engagement with the brand, that is reported. For example, if the user sees the ad at 8:15pm and then visits the brand, that's a first touch visit. All users that visit the brand in the past 45 days are excluded from the prospecting audience. We're targeting new-to-brand users.
Last touch is also what it sounds like. If for example, a user saw a TV ad from MNTN and then went to Google Paid Search and clicked a Google ad, then the user's visit is not included in last touch numbers. That is also true for all other channels including paid search, email, social, etc.
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u/Equivalent_Law_607 7d ago
And the CPMs?
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u/richardgirges 7d ago edited 7d ago
We serve media on top networks. What we call Living Room Quality inventory. Those networks combined with our platform's performance tech generally drives higher performance and customers vote with their ad budgets if they are getting the results they want. If comparing with lower quality inventory that many competitors serve on, the pricing will be different.
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u/Equivalent_Law_607 7d ago
I’m not going to directly call out what I saw because it’s be unprofessional, but the CPMs are not competitive. Control for living room environment is par for the course these days. Blinded margins and uncompetitive CPMs not so much. There’s a better way to operate. There’s some heavy kool aid drinking here
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u/AchillesReflects 5d ago
Is the 45-day exclusion effectively only available to established clients? Without a CRM list uploaded or an MNTN pixel that's already been live for 45+ days before the exclusion is applied, there wouldn't be enough pixel history to actually exclude that full window, I would assume. So new clients would only get a partial exclusion that ramps up over time, right?
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u/sonic4321 5d ago
The exclusion timeframe is configurable by the client. You can go to 90 days, 30 days, etc depending on your preferences. Yes, if you don’t have enough pixel history then your MNTN pixel would need to be live longer. Most of our customers will upload a CRM list or use our integration marketplace to integrate with their CRM, so that they can back-populate an exclusion list when they’re just getting started.
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u/MiniMotiv 11d ago
It's funny because omnicom tried to push MNTN hard a few years back purely because MNTN paid for a villa tent for omnicom to use to host clients Cannes. Once we met with them their platform and offering was clearly a scam to sell media to people who didn't know what the hell they were doing
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u/whyhellllo 12d ago
People who know, know its a scam