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VIEW PASSES Publisher ad supply fell by up to 40% in Q2 of 2026 as AI era, zero‑click search choked the flow of traffic to news and other open‑web sites, according to new U.S. and U.K. benchmarking data from Ozone, shared exclusively with Digiday.
Despite that steep decline in display ad requests coming from publisher pages, spend hasn’t collapsed at the same rate, with rising eCPMs — particularly in the U.K. — doing most of the work to plug the gap left by disappearing volume.
The data, which tracked approximately 20 billion impressions, revealed that between April and June 2026, publisher ad request volumes were down by roughly 32% to 37% YoY in the U.S and 39% to 41% YoY in the U.K. The data was pulled from the software Ozone runs for a group of premium publisher members — not its own ad sales — tracking how many ad opportunities those sites see and what they sell for. Ozone’s publisher network includes the Guardian, News UK, and Dow Jones’ Wall Street Journal.
Across the first half of 2026, combined programmatic spend in Ozone’s U.S. and U.K. publisher cohort was down by 30.6% YoY, in line with the inventory loss, (spend fell 14.3% in U.K. as higher yields bridged the gap, and fell 44% in U.S. due to a smaller yield bump.)
Gabe Dorosz, advertising initiative lead for INMA, said the underlying shape of the U.S. market helps explain that gap. “The U.S. open web is bigger and messier, with a long tail of commodity supply still diluting yields, so the repricing is naturally showing up more slowly but my prediction is it will accelerate,” he said.
The double-digit drops in ad supply are essentially the economic footprint of declining referral traffic: as search and social platforms send fewer clicks out to publisher sites, there are simply fewer pageviews and therefore fewer ad calls to sell against. “There’s a series of fundamental changes in terms of how consumers behave around websites, where they go to source their information,” said Danny Spears, chief operating officer at Ozone. “Platforms, particularly Google, are intervening in the user journey and providing content in situ rather than redirecting to the underlying website as they used to with classic search.”
A less appreciated — and arguably more interesting — dynamic is that some of the supply shrinkage is deliberate, as publishers respond to demand for higher-quality inventory rather than just passively absorbing traffic declines, noted Gabe Dorosz, advertising lead at INMA. “Some publishers are also deliberately shaping supply, cutting ad load and low-value bid requests to protect or increase attention and price,” he said.
Despite the steep contraction in supply, prices have been moving in the opposite direction. In June, average eCPMs were about 30% higher YoY in the U.K., and 7% YoY higher in the U.S., a sign that buyers are willing to pay more for the remaining inventory.
“The fact that eCPM is increasing is actually a healthy sign of the market because it means that we have scarce resource and people are willing to pay more for it,” said Eliza Simonova, senior customer success and GTM manager for Ozone. “But because we have less ingredients to monetize, ultimately the spend is down.”
That pricing pressure isn’t new. Across the first half of 2025, average eCPMs were already up around 42% in the U.S. and 36% in the U.K., even as supply was starting to fall, indicating both markets had become effectively yield-led before this year’s deeper supply shock.
That raises the question of how far publishers can lean on yield before buyers start to walk away. Luke Stillman, md of Madison and Wall argued the ceiling is hard to call, pointing to TV as a precedent. “People were highlighting the risk of a yield‑led market in TV for more than a decade, and yet marketers who prioritize TV are willing to pay multiples of what they used to for the same inventory, despite smaller audiences,” he said. “It’s very difficult to say when ‘enough is enough’ in terms of pricing that actually spurs channel shifts.” In his view most of the shift from the open web into walled gardens will happen for other reasons, like “data availability, measurement credibility and convenience,” rather than because prices get too high on publisher inventory.
Several executives stressed that the problem isn’t a sudden loss of appetite for publisher content, but the way people now find it. And that’s not just in relation to AI search, but on what platforms younger eyeballs are consuming their news.
Ozone’s own data shows fewer monetizable pageviews and higher prices on what’s left — a pattern that lines up with discovery moving deeper into walled gardens rather than across the open web. “The open web is becoming smaller not because demand for content has fallen, but because discovery has moved,” said Matt Barash, CCO of Nova Studio. “More discovery happens inside social feeds, where every minute spent scrolling is a minute not generating open‑web inventory.”
The center of gravity is shifting, he noted. “Search created pageviews. Social creates engagement. As consumers spend less time navigating the open web, premium display inventory becomes scarcer and more valuable,” he added.
That dynamic is already pushing more publishers to double down on logged‑in, high‑attention environments — from subscription products to apps and newsletters — where they have more control over both discovery and pricing.
Stillman argued the change is already structural: publishers should take AI licensing money while it’s available, assume their open‑web ad business will keep deteriorating, and lean harder into subscription and event‑based models to support the rest of the P&L.
For Dorosz, the logic behind that pivot lies in how the ad market itself has been engineered. “What you’re seeing is publishers realizing that buying into the 15-year programmatic strategy of ‘infinite supply’ has effectively just steadily driven CPMs down, and AI-driven traffic declines have now killed the idea that there actually is infinite supply and this is without doubt a race to the bottom,” said Dorosz. That shift flips the supply-demand equation, but only for sellers who can prove they’re different. The opportunity sits with publishers that can surface meaningful signals: “through first-party, contextual, attention or other data” to show that their impressions meet the quality thresholds the buy side is now actively seeking, he stressed.
In June, apps were the only channel to grow YoY, with spend up about 23% and eCPMs up roughly 42% in the U.S. Web inventory followed the wider market pattern: spend rebounded 11% MoM but remained around 38.5% below the same period last year.
Within this largely display-led dataset, the recovery is being driven by display spend, which is about 12% MoM. Instream and Outstream video were a much smaller slice of the sample, but showed in-stream pricing was broadly flat YoY while out-stream video continues to shrink, with spend down roughly 76% YoY in June.
**Iran-U.S. conflict’s effect on programmatic spend **
The Iran-U.S. conflict shows up very clearly in Ozone’s U.S. programmatic data as a break from the norm. In both 2024 and 2025, all‑market U.S. spend dipped in February but was back to — or well above — its January baseline by May. In 2026, once the conflict began on Feb. 28, U.S. spend (excluding Xandr) went the other way: it slid month by month from January through April and, crucially, never recovered to its own January level by May.
Over that period, U.S. spend ended up around 18% below its pre‑conflict baseline, while the U.K. was about 10% above — a clear geo‑specific divergence that looks more like a U.S. confidence shock than a broad programmatic downturn, per the report.
Category‑level patterns reinforce that story. In the U.S., B2B technology and betting and gaming pulled back hardest, even as those same categories grew strongly in the U.K. over the same window — the clearest signal that certain U.S.‑exposed budgets were being reined in.
At the same time, more domestically driven categories like FMCG and retail fashion continued to grow in the U.S., suggesting that macro‑sensitive or globally exposed spend was d or cut, while day‑to‑day consumer demand held up.
The peace talks in mid‑May appear to have triggered only a partial recovery. Some DSPs like Yahoo DSP, The Trade Desk and Beeswax — started to bounce back into the peace‑talks window, but the two biggest pipes, DV360 and Amazon DSP, continued to decline, per the Ozone data, which analyzed daily DSP-level spend.
As a result, from June 1 to 18, U.S. spend had lifted off its May trough but was still sitting below its January baseline, whereas the U.K. was comfortably above January and tracking close to its June 2024 levels. In practical terms: there are early signs of stabilization in the U.S., but until DV360 and Amazon turn, any aggregate recovery in programmatic spend will remain muted, per the report.
Taken together, the conflict‑driven wobble in U.S. budgets and the longer‑running erosion of referral traffic point to a market that may not snap back to its old normal. Spears argues publishers should treat that as a structural reset rather than a blip. “The open web is shrinking,” he said. “Publishers with subscription businesses and apps look a lot more resilient in the face of supply decline. This feels like a market in recovery, but it’s a very volatile one — and those who are best armed with data and intelligence are in the best possible position to react.”
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