Ad Supply on the Open Web Fell Up to 41% Last Quarter. Advertisers Are Planning to Cut It 30% More.

On July 15, Digiday published benchmarking data from Ozone showing that publisher ad requests in the U.S. fell between 32% and 37% YoY in the second quarter. In the U.K., the drop ran between 39% and 41%.

Ozone runs roughly 20 billion impressions for premium publisher members including the Guardian, News UK, and the Wall Street Journal. That’s the inventory media plans are built on, not the junk end of the internet thinning out.

Danny Spears, chief operating officer at Ozone, named the cause:

“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.”

Zero-click search finally has a number on the sell side.

Every version of this story so far has been a traffic story, told from the publisher’s side of the ledger. This is the same event measured where it touches a media budget. An ad request is what a page sends when it loads, so a page that never loads is an impression that was never for sale. The audience didn’t just stop reading. The shelf stopped being stocked.

Then the prices moved the wrong way for anyone buying. In June, Ozone’s U.K. inventory carried eCPMs about 30% above the year before, with the U.S. up 7%. Web inventory in the same month sat 38.5% below where it was a year ago. Less to buy, and it costs more.

Matt Barash, chief commercial officer at Nova Studio, described the mechanic without flinching:

“Search created pageviews. Social creates engagement. As consumers spend less time navigating the open web, premium display inventory becomes scarcer and more valuable.”

Scarcer and more valuable is a fine sentence if you sell the inventory. It reads differently if you buy it.

The buy side has already done that math. Forrester expects advertisers to cut display investment with open-web publishers by 30% in 2026, redirecting the money toward connected TV and paid social. Evelyn Mitchell-Wolf, an ad-tech analyst at Forrester, put the reasoning in plain supply terms: “We expect that fewer consumers will be landing on the web pages where most of that display inventory has historically existed, and so there will just be fewer monetizable audiences there to begin with.”

Jonathan Geller, co-founder of the agency Lower Cross, described the decision the way a buyer actually makes it:

“I see the open web display category declining, for sure. Why would we allocate a budget to something that’s almost unmeasurable, that we really can’t see the performance lift of without doing tons of modeling… Why not throw that more into something where you know what the input and the output is?”

That’s the part that turns a publisher problem into a marketing problem. Display was never bought because it was precise. It was bought because it was cheap, plentiful, and good enough for reach. Take away plentiful and cheap, and the only argument left is a modeling exercise nobody wants to defend in a budget meeting.

The mechanism is a chain with no clever part in it. Google answers the question on the results page, so the click never leaves. Chartbeat data in the Reuters Institute’s trends report shows Google search referrals to publishers down 33% globally in the year to November 2025, and down 38% in the U.S. Fewer referrals mean fewer sessions, fewer sessions mean fewer page views, and each lost page view deletes several ad slots at once. The publisher loses revenue. The advertiser loses the aisle. Both were funded by the same click, and the click is gone.

Some of it is brutal at the individual title level. The music site Stereogum lost 70% of its ad revenue in 2025, and Business Insider’s organic search traffic dropped 55% between April 2022 and April 2025 before the company cut 21% of its staff.

For a marketing team, this reprices a line that’s been sitting quietly in the plan for a decade. Open-web display was the cheap reach column, the thing you bought when brand needed volume and the budget needed to look efficient. That column is now a scarcity market, and scarcity markets don’t reward the buyer who shows up late with the same brief. It’s the supply-side twin of the measurement problem AI search created for SEO, and it lands on the same budgets already absorbing the shift. The publishers saw it coming, which is why they’ve been rebuilding their sites for machines instead of readers.

Stop treating open-web display as the safe filler line. It’s a market with falling supply, rising prices, and a measurement story that got weaker while both moved. Either buy it deliberately, with a reason you’d say out loud to a CFO, or move the money to where the input and the output are legible and admit that’s what everyone else is doing. The cheap aisle of the internet is closing. Pretending otherwise just means paying 30% more for the privilege of not noticing.