VISTY vs Teads

TL;DR

Teads and VISTY both put video ads on premium publisher sites. The difference is what you actually buy. Teads sells impressions through an auction - you bid, prices move, and you pay whether or not anyone watches. VISTY sells completed video views at a flat CPCV - if the view isn't completed, you don't pay for it. Teads is built for enterprise brands and agencies buying omnichannel at scale. VISTY is built for mid-market B2B SaaS and DTC brands that want premium video attention without the auction, the DSP, or the guesswork.

Quick comparison

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What is Teads?

Teads more or less invented outstream video - the video players that sit inside editorial articles rather than before other video content. In February 2025, Outbrain completed its acquisition of Teads, and the combined company now operates under the Teads name as an omnichannel platform spanning web video, native, display and CTV, with a network of over 10,000 publishers.

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Credit where it's due. Teads has genuine strengths:

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• Serious scale. If you need global omnichannel reach across thousands of publishers, few open-web platforms match it.
• Premium editorial context. Like VISTY, Teads places ads within quality publisher content rather than the long tail of the open exchange.
• Strong creative tooling. Teads' creative studio and formats are well regarded, and the platform has invested in attention research.
• Flexible access. Self-serve through Teads Ad Manager, managed service, or programmatic through your existing DSP.

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Where it gets less comfortable for a mid-market buyer:

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• You're buying impressions in an auction. Your price moves with demand, and you pay when the ad is served, not when it's watched.
• Outstream view-counting has caveats. Digiday reported an advertiser whose outstream campaign showed a 59% completion rate but only 37% viewability - ads kept "playing" after they'd scrolled out of view. Teads offers a "view to play" player option that pauses off-screen, which is to their credit, but the default economics of the category still favour the seller.
• It's built for scale buyers. The platform, the workflow and the optimisation layer all assume a team (or agency) is running it.

What is VISTY?

VISTY is an Attention as a Service platform. One model, done properly: guaranteed completed video views on a curated allowlist of premium publishers - think Forbes, Business Insider, The New York Times and their equivalents across the US, UK, Ireland, Australia, Germany and the UAE - at a flat CPCV, on a simple subscription.

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I spent 12 years inside programmatic before building VISTY. The reason it exists is simple: the ANA found that only 36 cents of every dollar entering a DSP reaches a real consumer. The rest disappears into fees, made-for-advertising sites and inventory nobody can verify. And Lumen Research data shows only 30% of "viewable" ads are actually seen by a human eye. Nobody looked. You still paid. VISTY gives mid-market brands access to the same premium inventory and solutions as enterprise brands have had for years.

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VISTY removes that gamble. Before your campaign goes live, you see the exact list of 30-40 publishers it will run on. Then you pay only for views that complete. Not served. Not viewable. Watched to the end.

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What VISTY is not:

• It's not a do-everything platform. VISTY leads with premium online video, with CTV and programmatic audio available where they fit the brief. No display, no native, no formats that don't earn attention.
• It's not self-serve. Campaigns are managed for you. If you want to pull levers in a console every day, Teads' Ad Manager is the better fit.
• It's not a 10,000-site network. The allowlist is deliberately small. That's the point.

The real difference: what counts as a view

Strip everything else away and the comparison comes down to this.

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On an auction CPM model, the risk sits with you. You pay when the ad is served. Whether anyone watches it is your problem. The ANA's Q1 2026 Programmatic Transparency Benchmark found higher-performing advertisers converted 54% of programmatic spend into qualified impressions, while lower performers managed just 32% - the widest gap in the report's history. The difference isn't intelligence. It's access and accountability.

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On a flat CPCV model, the risk sits with the platform. If the view doesn't complete, VISTY doesn't get paid. That single change in incentive does more for media quality than any block list ever will.

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It shows up in delivery too. A recent VISTY campaign for a B2B SaaS brand targeting CTOs, CIOs and security leaders delivered 60,000+ completed views across Business Insider, VentureBeat and Forbes - with CTO ranking second and CIO third in audience delivery. Every one of those views was watched to the end, and that's all the client paid for.

Full campaign case study post.

So which should you choose?

Choose Teads if you're an enterprise brand or agency that needs omnichannel scale across thousands of publishers, has a team to run the platform, and is comfortable buying impressions through an auction.

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Choose VISTY if you're a mid-market B2B SaaS or DTC brand that wants premium publisher video, complete cost certainty, a publisher list you can read before launch, and a bill that only counts views people actually finished.

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Honestly? Some brands should use both. Teads for breadth, VISTY for guaranteed attention. But if you're choosing where the next tranche of video budget goes and you can't afford to pay for ads nobody watched, the flat CPCV model is the safer bet.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does VISTY replace what I'm running on Meta, Google or Teads?

No. VISTY was built to complement your existing channels, not replace them - a premium attention layer that makes the rest of the mix work harder. Most VISTY clients keep their social and search spend exactly where it is.

Are the video ads skippable or non-skippable?

It depends on the publisher environment. VISTY runs pre-roll and mid-roll instream plus medium and large outstream players, and matches the format to the context - including content behind paywalls. What's never used: post-roll or in-banner video, because they're proven attention dead zones. Either way, you only pay when the view completes, so the skippable question loses most of its sting.

How do I know where my ads actually ran?

You know before they run. VISTY shares the exact allowlist of 30-40 approved publishers ahead of launch, and delivery reporting is broken out site by site. No surprises buried in a delivery report.

Is Teads the same company as Outbrain?

Yes. Outbrain completed its acquisition of Teads in February 2025, and the combined business operates under the Teads brand - pairing Teads' outstream video heritage with Outbrain's native recommendation business.

What exactly is a completed view?

A viewer watched your video ad from start to finish. Not an impression (the ad loaded), not a viewable impression (half the ad was on screen for a moment), not a 3-second scroll-past. Completed views are the billing unit of Attention as a Service - and the reason CPCV is a more honest metric than CPM.

Is there a minimum spend?

VISTY runs on a simple monthly subscription with packages built for mid-market budgets - no enterprise minimums, no annual lock-in. Book a 20-minute call and we'll find the right starting point.

The bottom line

Teads is a good platform - a category creator with real scale. But scale and attention are not the same purchase. If what you actually want is your video watched, on publishers you can name, at a price that doesn't move - that's not what an auction sells.

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Book a 20-minute call and I'll show you what guaranteed completed views look like for your brand.

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This is Attention as a Service. This is VISTY.

Visibility. Done Simple.

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