A broken ad tech supply chain is draining value from publishers and advertisers alike—exposing the urgent need for smarter, fairer, and more transparent tools built with publishers in mind.
Somewhere between an advertiser’s media plan and the publisher’s page, a lot of money seems to disappear. It slips through the cracks of the ad tech supply chain, shaved off by intermediaries and filters, fragmented across systems, and drained by tools designed more to gatekeep than to guide.
For advertisers, that means rising costs and diminishing clarity. For publishers, it means getting paid less for content that audiences still want and value.
The open web, once a beacon of accessibility and decentralized creativity, is now straining under the weight of a system that seems to work for everyone except those actually producing the content.
And while money is the most visible casualty here, the root of the issue goes deeper than just financial leakage. At its core, this is a logic failure; an infrastructure built on too many self-serving tools, outdated philosophies, and “partnerships” that behave more like quiet adversaries.
The problem isn’t what’s being spent; it’s how much value is being lost along the way, and why publishers are still being asked to settle for what’s left at the bottom of the waterfall.
The Price of a Broken System
We’ve been told for years that complexity is the cost of sophistication in digital advertising. That a tangled web of vendors, filters, and tech intermediaries is the price we pay for better targeting, greater control, and brand safety.
But that complexity has quietly become its own form of inefficiency. One where each new layer extracts value instead of adding it, and where performance is too often measured by what’s technically delivered rather than what’s genuinely effective.
Publishers, in particular, are asked to pay steeply for this illusion of control. Many of the tools integrated into the supply chain do little to help them understand or increase the value of their inventory. Some siphon off first-party data under the guise of optimization, but offer nothing in return—not even the insights that could help publishers enhance their own propositions. The promise of collaboration has too often been replaced with tech that operates independently of publisher goals, while claiming to represent them.
The end result is a system where a disproportionate share of every advertising dollar gets eaten up before the publisher sees a cent. And even then, the value they do receive is often filtered through outdated brand safety logic that blocks perfectly suitable pages for featuring one “wrong” word in the wrong context.
The Need for Smarter, Not Just More, Tech
It’s easy to say the system needs simplification. But simplification doesn’t mean stripping everything back to the studs. It means being more intentional about the tools we rely on, and choosing those that add clarity, transparency, and precision without bloating the chain or penalizing quality.
Modern contextual technologies are starting to show what this could look like. Instead of relying on blunt keyword blocklists or opaque third-party tagging, these systems read the full meaning of a page—its tone, sentiment, and subject matter—and assess suitability based on relevance, not red flags. That means less wastage for advertisers, and far fewer missed opportunities for publishers.
Crucially, these tools don’t just interpret content, they do it in ways that can be fed back into the ecosystem. They can help publishers understand why a page performed, not just that it did. And they don’t come at the cost of data sovereignty. Instead of harvesting first-party insights to fuel external systems, the right contextual solution works within the publisher’s framework to enhance its value, not extract it.
Rebuilding Real Partnership
There’s no getting around the fact that the relationship between tech platforms and publishers has become increasingly transactional. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. A better system isn’t just one where spend reaches publishers more efficiently, it’s one where the value exchange is fair, transparent, and mutual.
That means rebuilding the notion of partnership to mean something real. It means moving away from one-way dependencies and toward systems where both sides—buyers and sellers, advertisers and media owners—benefit from the same signals, the same insights, the same efficiency gains. It means less hiding behind proprietary black boxes and more openness about how value is created, and where it goes.
And perhaps most importantly, it means designing with publishers in mind from the start, not retrofitting tools built for buyers to work for the sell-side. Precision, suitability, and performance shouldn’t come at the publisher’s expense. They should be what lifts them.
Towards a Healthier Supply Chain
Fixing the leaky pipe between brands and publishers isn’t about placing blame, but about rethinking how the system is built. The open web still has enormous potential to serve as a sustainable, high-quality environment for advertising; one that rewards the people creating content as much as those placing ads around it.
Publishers don’t need more tech; they need better tech. Tech that helps them prove their value, retain their data, and rebuild the trust that too many have been forced to give away for too little in return. If we want a healthier ecosystem, we have to start by making the pipes less leaky, and a lot more fair.