In 2022 the number was $20 million. In December 2024 it was $3 billion in guaranteed alternative currency. In May 2026 it became upwards of $6 billion in currency and measurement, across 11 agency groups and more than 1,600 advertisers.

The same month it hit $6 billion, VideoAmp walked away from the one audit that could have checked it, and by August it was cutting roughly a fifth of its staff.

Adoption does not compound at that rate. Definitions do.

Watch the word bolted on between the two releases. "And measurement." Underneath it sits a unit of account VideoAmp has never defined in public: the processed impression. It is not a transacted impression. Nobody at the company has said it is. Nobody has said it isn't.

A former VideoAmp employee, anonymous because of the legal exposure, describes the figure as $6 billion of TV throughput, not $6 billion: an average total-day linear CPM across publisher partners, multiplied by total processed publisher impressions. In his account the company earns low single-digit percentages on measured volume, and 2025 was tracking well short of plan after Paramount renewed with Nielsen.

A senior network executive with no reason to defend Nielsen got to the same worry from the other side. Counted that way, the pile can include measurement-only reads, competitive pulls on inventory a publisher does not own, and secondary reads on buys guaranteed against Nielsen, where somebody else is the currency of record.

Multiply that by a rate the company selects and you get throughput, not money anyone paid. A grocery scale does not get to book the retail value of everything weighed on it.

Josh Chasin was VideoAmp's Chief Measurability Officer from March 2020 to January 2024, now at KnotSimpler.

Asked what the figure is supposed to mean, Chasin gave the good-faith reading: "the sum total of ad dollars spent in which VideoAmp was used as the transactional currency." At a penny on the dollar, that implies about $60 million of revenue against it.

Then the part that matters. "We weren't touting an '$X in currency' number while I was there." His tenure ran to January 2024. That is not a criticism of the practice on his part; his point is narrower. When he left, VideoAmp was still closing out the business that led to currency use in the first place.

On how those dollars were supposed to be tracked, Chasin was careful: "It was important to understand how many dollars were spent using VideoAmp; I wasn't privy to how we would track that."

Told the derivation described by the former employee, Chasin said he could not confirm it, and had no reason to think it was the case.

That is chronology and a declined confirmation, not an accusation. The practice of announcing the figure started after the executive responsible for measurement rigor left, and the person best positioned to validate the math won't.

Chasin's pushback, on the record and unresolved: alternative currency skews toward advanced targets, which he believes carry higher CPMs, because that audience is scarcer. If he's right, a blended rate could understate the figure as easily as it flatters it. That is the actual finding here. Nobody outside VideoAmp can tell which direction the number is wrong in, because the mix isn't published. ADOTAT is not resolving that argument. It's presented as an open dispute, not a rebuttal.