Just a few years ago, a Raptive executive told me that IntentIQ a "parasite."

On February 3, 2026, they announced a full partnership deploying IntentIQ's Bid Enhancement across their entire publisher network. Paul Bannister, Raptive's chief strategy officer, stood up and praised their "technology leadership and identity resolution solutions" and talked about "empowering publishers with improved yield, transparency, and future-proof monetisation."

That arc, from parasite to partner, from enemy to inaugural integration, isn't just a corporate reconciliation story. It's the story of an entire industry realizing it was losing a war it didn't know how to win.

And Raptive wasn't alone in its hostility. Not even close.

I remember when someone at the IAB tech lab made it plain in the way only adtech people can when they think they're off the record: "IntentIQ is the cockroach of adtech.”

Now? We love them. We will work with them. We will integrate their technology into the spine of our business and announce it in a press release with quotes that read like wedding toasts.

What happened?

The same thing that always happens. The math changed. And in adtech, math is the only religion that actually converts people.

Here's the thing about IntentIQ that the industry spent years trying not to say out loud: their patent portfolio is enormous, it's enforceable, and nobody has successfully dismantled it yet.

That last word matters. Yet.

170-plus granted patents through AlmondNet Group. Not pending. Not provisional. Granted. Covering cross-site profile building, off-site retargeting, profit-based media selection. The kind of foundational adtech plumbing that basically everyone touches every day without thinking about who owns the blueprints.

Microsoft's Xandr took a license. Roku took a license, though as we'll see, Roku didn't stop fighting after it paid. Amazon lost a combined $136 million verdict and then got sued again in April 2025 for good measure. Comcast, Lotame, the list of companies that either settled, licensed, or are currently sitting in Western District of Texas dockets is long enough to fill a conference panel.

The math became brutally simple for many companies watching: you can spend years and millions fighting in W.D. Texas, or you can integrate, start making money, and move on with your life. When Microsoft decides the smarter play is to take a license rather than litigate, that sends a signal to every mid-tier SSP and publisher network in the ecosystem. The signal is: stop pretending you're going to win this.

But here's what makes this story more complicated than a clean surrender narrative. Not everyone got that signal. Or more precisely, some very large, very well-funded companies got the signal and decided to send one back.

Meta Platforms is running a multi-front campaign. Defending in W.D. Texas while simultaneously leading multiple PTAB inter partes reviews aimed at invalidating AlmondNet and IntentIQ patents outright. Roku, even after taking a license, filed its own IPRs and joined Meta and Samsung as co-petitioners in PTAB challenges. Viant filed IPR2025-00129 attacking 99 claims of a core patent on obviousness grounds. Comcast and FreeWheel have pushed hard enough in Delaware that AlmondNet had to drop some earlier patents and re-file with what RPX describes as "battle-tested" replacements. Which is a polite way of saying the defendants forced a portfolio-narrowing move rather than quietly rolling over.

The PTAB results so far have been mixed. In one high-profile IPR brought by Meta, Roku, and Samsung, the Board upheld a key TV-ads patent against obviousness. That's a real win for IntentIQ. But in other proceedings, different AlmondNet claims have been knocked out. And the Viant IPR, which the PTAB explicitly agreed to review on all challenged claims, is still pending. Those 99 claims are sitting in front of the Board right now. Nobody knows how that lands.

So when I say Raptive's surrender tells the story of an industry, I mean it. But the story has more than one ending still in play.

The genius of IntentIQ's repositioning, and it is a repositioning, make no mistake, is that they didn't just wave patents around and demand rent. They built something people actually want to use.

Bid Enhancement isn't a legal settlement dressed up as a product. It strengthens identity signals in programmatic bidding, works across both cookie-based environments like Chrome and ID-less environments like iOS and Safari, and delivers what IntentIQ and its partners consistently describe as "immediate and durable revenue lift." Start.io integrated their alternative identifiers and saw a 9.8 percent increase in ad fill rates and a 12 percent boost in daily revenue. In a commoditized marketplace, those aren't rounding errors. Those are the numbers that make a CFO return your call.

Roy Shkedi, IntentIQ's chairman, has been explicit about this for years. "This is our core," he's said. "We're really a technology company at heart." And the framing around the Raptive deal was careful and deliberate: "By combining Raptive's high-quality publisher ecosystem and recognised leadership in advancing industry standards with Intent IQ's identity resolution technology, we're unlocking stronger demand, better monetisation, and measurable outcomes for both publishers and advertisers."

That's not the language of a company extracting tribute. That's the language of a company that figured out the most powerful thing you can do with a patent portfolio is make the license feel like a partnership. When the technology actually works, when it actually closes the identity gap that costs publishers real money every single day, the distinction between "paying for a license" and "paying for infrastructure" dissolves. And that dissolution is the entire strategy.

The industry spent years calling them a patent troll. IntentIQ responded by building a product good enough that the troll label stopped sticking.

For a while, ID5.io looked like the answer the industry wanted. A French company. European. Open-source-friendly. Independent. Privacy-forward in that specific EU way that American adtech likes to admire from a distance without actually committing to. ID5 positioned itself as the identity layer that didn't come with litigation baggage, the clean alternative for companies that didn't want to do business with the "cockroach."

And in Europe, that positioning still has some legs. GDPR territory rewards a certain kind of compliance theater, and ID5 knows how to perform it. Whether that creates a genuinely separate market where IntentIQ's dominance doesn't translate is an open question worth watching. The EU has a habit of building its own rules and its own winners, and writing off ID5 entirely would be premature.

But identity in adtech isn't primarily decided in Europe. It's decided in America. Specifically, it's decided in the offices of American agencies, on the servers of American SSPs, in the courtrooms of the Western District of Texas, and in the boardrooms where American publishers look at their revenue dashboards and realize that more than 50 percent of their traffic lives in environments where traditional identifiers don't exist.

IntentIQ planted its flag on America. HQ in Herzliya, offices in New York, patents enforceable in U.S. federal courts, and commercial integrations with the companies that actually move programmatic dollars at scale. ID5 didn't get pushed out of the U.S. by technology alone. It got outmaneuvered by a combination of IP leverage, commercial integration depth, and the sheer gravitational pull of the American programmatic market.

When Horizon Media built HorizonOS, what it calls the industry's first marketing operating system, and needed an identity partner, it didn't call Paris. It called Tel Aviv. John Koenigsberg, Horizon's EVP and Head of Product Partnerships, described them as "a market-leading company whose innovative technology is helping to drive real performance across today's fragmented media landscape." That's not a hedge. That's a bet.

The person at ID5 who called IntentIQ "the worst people" wasn't wrong about their tactics being aggressive. But being aggressive and being wrong are two different things. And in a market where cookieless traffic isn't a corner case but the majority of the addressable internet, being right about identity and aggressive about protecting it turns out to be a winning combination.

At least so far.

Fabrice Beer-Gabel, IntentIQ's SVP of Strategy and Partnerships, put it plainly: "We're entering 2026 into a world of fragmentation, where it's very hard to have identity apply in environments with limited signal reach. What we're seeing now is the need to transform infrastructure into orchestration. There is so much fragmentation you don't know what to bet on."

He's right. And that fragmentation is exactly why the old resistance playbook collapsed for most companies. Not all of them. But most.

Safari killed cookies. iOS tightened the screws. Firefox nodded along politely. CTV added entirely new layers of confusion. MAIDs wobbled. Regulators circled. And the result wasn't a clean transition to some elegant new standard. The result was chaos. A patchwork of signal-constrained environments where more than half of U.S. users' digital touchpoints live in places where traditional identifiers simply don't work.

Shkedi has reduced this to arithmetic that should make every publisher uncomfortable: targeted advertising accounts for roughly 50 to 70 percent of a typical publisher's revenue. When identity breaks, publishers don't lose efficiency. They lose viability.

The most uncomfortable number is the one everyone in the industry knows but rarely says out loud: the same user generates roughly three times more ad revenue on Android than on iOS, even though the average household income of iOS users is about 40 percent higher. That gap isn't about user preferences or creative quality. It's pure identity failure. And IntentIQ exists to close it.

Koenigsberg at Horizon described the shift in thinking: "The biggest evolution in our approach to identity has been moving to flexibility and composability in identity strategy, and having choice and adaptability." Identity, he said, "plays a role in pretty much every facet of what we need to do for our clients."

These aren't reluctant partners describing a necessary evil. They're describing a world where IntentIQ has become load-bearing infrastructure. The thing you build on, not the thing you fight against.

Unless you're Meta. Or Viant. Or one of the other companies with the legal budget to test whether the load-bearing wall is actually as solid as it looks.

Here's what I keep coming back to.

A year ago: "Cockroach of adtech." "The worst people." "Parasite."

Today: inaugural HorizonOS partner. Full Raptive integration. Bannister praising their technology leadership. Koenigsberg calling them market-leading. Beer-Gabel talking about doubling reach while exceeding performance goals.

That's not a PR campaign. That's a market verdict.

When a company that 80,000 publishers integrate with, that reaches 180 million cookieless users, that holds 170-plus granted patents covering the foundational mechanics of digital identity, and that delivers measurable revenue lift in the environments where everyone else is flying blind, when that company stops being the enemy and starts being the partner, it means a large portion of the industry has made a collective, largely unspoken decision.

The decision is: fighting IntentIQ costs more than working with them. And working with them actually works.

But a decision made by the majority is not the same as a decision made by everyone. And the minority that's still fighting includes some of the biggest, most technically sophisticated, best-lawyered companies in technology. Their PTAB challenges haven't failed yet. Some of them haven't even been decided yet.

That's good for IntentIQ today. But the patent story has another chapter that hasn't been written.

Raptive figured that out and picked a side. Horizon figured that out and picked a side. The question now is whether the companies still fighting are wasting their money or buying time until the wall cracks.

I know which way I lean. But I've been wrong before. And in patent law, everyone has been wrong before.