With ad tech’s ‘tax’ on innovation is finally under scrutiny, publishers look to reclaim the open web

The dominance of a few ad tech giants has stifled innovation for years, limiting choice and locking publishers into systems that rarely served their best interests. That quiet toll, a “tax” on progress, is now facing long-overdue scrutiny.John Douglas, an ad tech veteran with experience on both sides of the industry—first at Amazon post-Sizmek, then leading product at WeTransfer Advertising—is calling out a system where platform power came first and publisher progress was left behind.The GAM tax man: “Moving to the sell-side was eye-opening,” Douglas says. “I saw firsthand just how little competition there truly was for publishers and what that did to the marketplace; regardless of what a publisher wanted to do, or which vendors they looked at, you still always needed GAM.” GAM’s near-ubiquity, Douglas says, meant that even if the platform seemed free, publishers paid an indirect cost. They faced a stagnant marketplace for sell-side tools, locked into one system while fear of risk kept smaller vendors out. The result was a slowdown in meaningful progress across the board.Decade in beta: “Think about it: in 2024, there were ad tech companies still in beta for Programmatic Guaranteed—a feature that’s been around for over a decade. Why? Because they knew their customers all had GAM and could support PG through it.” The result wasn’t progress, it was complacency. With GAM as the fallback, there was little incentive to invest in real alternatives.AI’s brand revival: Looking forward, Douglas sees artificial intelligence offering a path for publishers to reclaim ground. “When I think about AI on the sell-side, the most interesting part isn’t just another optimization layer,” he muses. “It’s how AI can reduce the cost and effort for publishers to genuinely rethink their strategy beyond being just a programmatic data pipe.” He elaborates on this point: “If your entire story is just the audience data you possess, you’re not building a narrative around your unique brand. You become interchangeable, and the only lever you have is price.”AI, in his view, can help publishers break this cycle by articulating their unique brand value, moving beyond a simple race to the bottom on rates and inventory volume. Doing so could involve AI assisting in scaling more brand-centric approaches, like direct sales or deeper partnerships, often too resource-intensive for many against the tide of commoditized data.Web’s town square: Douglas sees the “open web” as more than an ad delivery system. It’s the digital town square. “It’s not fundamentally an advertising concept,” he says. “It’s the ability for anyone to express themselves.” The real threat, in his view, isn’t ad tech itself, but the internet collapsing into a few dominant walled gardens.Doesn’t ad up: The health of the open web depends on better advertising and a deeper respect for publisher brand equity. “How do we support an open web that doesn’t just devolve into a few dominant walled gardens?” he asks. “We have to look beyond outcomes and start valuing the brands that publishers are actually building.”He points to the disconnect between premium content and bottom-barrel ads: “It’s jarring to see a major organization running low-quality ads in their own app. That tells you something is broken.” For Douglas, the fix starts with redefining what good advertising looks like. Not just chasing performance metrics, but protecting the very value that fuels them.