The Danger of Romanticizing the Open Web
Adtech professionals often romanticize the open web, frequently positioning it as morally or qualitatively superior to the walled gardens. At DMS by LUMA, The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green, for example, contrasted the open internet’s wealth of movies, TV, and journalism with the “cat videos” of the walled gardens. Others wax poetic about “quality” and “premium publishers,” suggesting the open web possesses an inherent virtue its closed counterparts lack.
To some degree, I buy it. Every open web adtech company should remember the real fight is with the walled gardens, which still vacuum up two-thirds of ad spend. Instead of taking shots at one another, adtech companies should make the case for the open internet as a viable, even preferable, place for advertiser investment. When the bellwethers of the open internet win, we all win (as recent TTD stock cycles have illustrated). When they lose, we all lose.
That said, we can’t afford to romanticize the open internet to the point that we lose sight of how things actually work — or what advertisers and consumers really care about.
First, there’s no clean line between a high-quality open internet and a low-quality closed one. The open web hosts both premium content and junk (see: MFA sites and Adalytics news cycles). The walled gardens are home to cat videos, sure — but also to huge volumes of high-quality content: creators with powerful influence, massive reach, and deep audience trust. And increasingly, the walled gardens are also home to traditional premium content like live sports (see YouTube TV, Amazon’s MGM and Thursday Night Football rights).
You could even argue that if creators are the future of high-quality, bottom-up content, then the walled gardens are the future home of premium, democratic publishing.
Second, the definition of premium isn’t something for legacy media or adtech CEOs to dictate. Consumers define it — with their attention, engagement, and wallets. If younger consumers spend more time watching MrBeast than Timothée Chalamet, trust creators more than journalists, and value individual authenticity over Hollywood polish, then MrBeast is the new standard for premium publishing. And the industry needs to catch up to that definition of premium, not fight it by grasping onto history.
Third, advertisers — particularly SMBs and performance marketers — aren’t buying media based on a philosophical stance on content quality. They’re buying outcomes. Sure, brand advertisers care about environment. But for the vast majority of advertisers — especially those who’ve made Meta and Google the dominant media platforms — the priority is performance. (And even those brand marketers and their agencies are at least as concerned with performance as they are with an abstract value such as quality.)
As I’ve argued before, we’re in the Outcomes Era. And that’s the terrain on which the open internet must compete.
I recently spoke to a startup founder in the space who put it well (paraphrasing):
“Our customers pay rent to the walled gardens for performance. What we want to do is make the open web a performance channel. Let others argue for the open web on the basis of optionality. We’re going to argue that the open web performs. That’s a more compelling case, and it’s how the open internet catches up in the Outcomes Era.”
In short, the danger of romanticizing the open internet is that we lose sight of two critical truths:
What consumers really care about — and therefore what premium actually means.
What advertisers really care about — which, more often than not, is not content quality but outcomes.
If we ignore those truths, we risk making strategic errors: selling a story that doesn’t align with the people we’re trying to reach or the media buyers funding the ecosystem.
The case for the open internet is worth making. But it has to be rooted in performance, not nostalgia. Quality is whatever captures attention. Value is whatever drives outcomes. That’s the standard now — and it’s the one the open web has to meet.
