The Open Web Is Set to Be the Biggest Loser in the Ad Market

Based on forecasts by Tom Triscari, the "Open Web" is projected to lose substantial market share to major tech platforms by 2029. The numbers are stark — and the strategic response required is equally significant.

Key Forecasts

• Market Contraction: The Open Web's share of the total advertising market is forecast to drop from $70 billion today to $40 billion by 2029.
• Market Growth: Despite the Open Web's decline, the total advertising "pie" is expected to grow by 30%.
• The Winners: Growth will be captured almost entirely by "landowners" — tech giants with massive data, infrastructure, and AI-driven CAPEX capabilities: Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Bytedance, Microsoft.

Why the Open Web Is Losing Share

• Advertiser Frustration: The Open Web is perceived as overly complex, difficult to measure, and prone to fraud.
• Consumer Behaviour Shift: Users are moving away from URL-based browsing toward answer engines, chatbots, and AI-powered apps. Younger demographics conduct discovery entirely within social platforms rather than visiting independent websites.

"19-20 year olds often cannot name a single website they visit regularly." — Laura Cioffi

Strategic Outlook for Publishers

As the era of "scale and cheap reach" ends, publishers must pivot from a volume play to a value play:

• Flight to Quality: Unique, differentiated content that cannot be easily replicated by AI.
• First-Party Data: Cultivating niche, proprietary data sets that have value to advertisers.
• Diversification: Beyond display ads toward subscriptions, events, commerce media, and content licensing.
• AI Integration: Positioning content as high-quality training data for LLMs, potentially shifting toward licensing-fee models.

Expert Commentary

"Serving banner ads next to contextual relevant content is going to be like fax was to emails." — Gareth Jones

"Everything must be a value play." — Ioannis Bakagiannis

The publishers who survive this transition will be those who treat it as a planning exercise, not a crisis response.

---

MIMMS helps publishers build the data and monetisation infrastructure to compete in a value-driven market. Start with a free discovery call.