The open web is producing dramatically fewer ad impressions, and the drop is not subtle. New data from Ozone — drawn from roughly 20 billion impressions across a premium publisher network that includes The Guardian, News UK and the WSJ — shows publisher ad requests fell 32–37% year over year in the US and 39–41% year over year in the UK during Q2 2026. Combined US/UK programmatic spend across the network was down 30.6% YoY in H1 2026, with US spend down 44% and UK spend down 14.3%. This isn’t a demand recession. It’s supply disappearing, because the audience never arrives at the page.
The numbers in this piece
01What the data shows
Ozone COO Danny Spears puts the cause squarely on the platforms, particularly Google, “intervening in the user journey and providing content in situ.” When an AI-generated answer satisfies the query, the click never happens, the page never renders, and the ad request never fires. That is a structural change in inventory volume, not a seasonal dip.
The pricing side is the more interesting half of the story. UK eCPMs rose roughly 30% YoY in June, versus about 7% in the US. Scarcity is repricing what’s left — and the UK’s much shallower spend decline (down 14.3% against the US’s 44%) suggests higher yields are absorbing a meaningful part of the volume loss. Scarcity economics are real, but they’re clearly not compensating evenly across markets.
Channel mix tells you where the surviving attention went. Apps were the only growth story: US app spend up 23% and app eCPMs up 42%. Meanwhile outstream video spend collapsed 76% YoY — the format most dependent on incidental scroll-past page traffic fell hardest, exactly as you’d expect when page sessions evaporate.
One honest caveat before you build a forecast on this: Ozone is a single network, premium-skewed and UK-weighted. Treat these figures as strongly directional for the open web, not as a market-wide census.
02Why this matters for publishers
| Your problem may be volume, not yield | If your revenue is down but your CPMs are flat or rising, you are living inside this data. Chasing yield optimization won't fix a shortfall caused by requests that no longer exist. Diagnose which one you actually have before you spend a quarter tuning floors. |
|---|---|
| Scarcity can work in your favor — if your inventory is worth bidding on | The ~30% UK eCPM rise shows buyers will pay up for premium open-web supply when there's less of it. That premium accrues to differentiated, brand-safe environments. Commodity inventory just gets less of it. |
| Owned destinations are outperforming borrowed ones | App spend up 23% and app eCPMs up 42%, against outstream down 76%, is a clean signal: destinations where the audience arrives deliberately are holding value. Formats that depend on drive-by traffic are the first casualty. |
The numbers stop adding up when the input stops arriving.
03What publishers should do
04The bottom line
The numbers stop adding up when the input stops arriving. Ad requests are falling faster than ad budgets, which means the open web is becoming a smaller, more expensive market rather than simply a cheaper one. That’s survivable for publishers with inventory buyers actually want and destinations audiences actually choose. For everyone monetizing incidental search traffic with commodity formats, this quarter’s data is not a warning — it’s the outcome.