Stop chasing clicks: Why smart publishers are betting on signal over scale

The open web collectively processes billions of ad requests every hour across multiple platforms. The scale is extraordinary, but it also underscores a widening gap between quantity and quality.

Alongside a thriving premium ecosystem, a long tail of low-quality and MFA supply continues to expand, creating more noise for the systems that decide value.

The challenge isn’t the web’s health, but its visibility, ensuring that quality signals stand out in a market built for scale.

From conversations with leaders such as Ben Walmsley, senior vice president at News Corp, it’s clear that publishers are leading the charge in redefining value. Across major media organizations, investment is shifting away from raw traffic toward identity, transparency and user trust. That means faster sites, cleaner ad experiences and more logged-in engagement — a move from anonymous reach to known relationships.

Titles such as The Times and The Sun are expanding subscription and registration while apps and account-based environments deepen user connections without abandoning open-web reach. These pragmatic steps aim to strengthen both revenue resilience and audience understanding.

Yet as publishers modernize, three persistent questions remain: Can quality be seen? Can it be rewarded? And can it be measured?

When quality cannot be seen

The sheer volume of bid requests moving through ad tech each second forces both sell- and buy-side systems to filter which impressions are evaluated.

Unfortunately, many high-quality opportunities are excluded — not because they lack value, but because the infrastructure favors volume over nuance.

Publishers are continuously improving inventory and enriching signals for buyers, yet the industry still struggles to identify which of those signals drive results.

Machines cannot reward what they cannot read. When systems are optimized for reach rather than recognition, even the cleanest environments can remain invisible to the demand that values them most.

When good signals go unrewarded

The industry has made significant progress in transparency and supply path optimization. Publishers are simplifying ads.txt files, reducing intermediaries and enhancing the user experience.

Some report faster load times and higher eCPMs. Others, like Chegg, have removed entire layers of resellers without losing revenue. Yet there is still no consistent link between better signals and better yield.

At News Corp and other leading publishers, efforts to improve privacy, UX and identity continue, but across the wider ecosystem, there’s still a lack of commercial feedback on which improvements are recognized and rewarded.

A recent analysis of publicly available OpenSincera data across around 100 U.K. publishers shows that premium-quality signals rarely exist in isolation. The strongest results appear when identity pass-through, ad density and path hygiene improve together, with environments that preserve identifiers, maintain lower ad density, and limit unnecessary reselling tending to show healthier signal profiles - technically cleaner, more measurable, and more trusted.

This is not causation, but it is directionally clear: The open web already contains the right signals. The task is to make them visible and actionable.

Making quality legible

The next frontier in programmatic advertising is not more data but better interpretation. Quality must be legible to the systems that price it.

Buyers increasingly value transparency, sustainability and contextual integrity. Platforms must surface those signals consistently so that premium environments are rewarded rather than lost in the noise.

OpenSincera data supports this view. Publishers that maintain high ID fidelity, reduce ad clutter and apply more structured placement taxonomies tend to exhibit healthier, more transparent signal profiles.

Analysis of publicly available OpenSincera data across UK publishers supports this view. Publishers that maintain high ID fidelity, reduce ad clutter, and apply more structured placement taxonomies tend to exhibit healthier, more transparent signal profiles.

Together, these patterns suggest a working framework for what “premium” looks like in measurable terms; one that buyers can use to identify cleaner opportunities and that publishers can use to demonstrate value more clearly.

For example, OpenSincera’s broader dataset shows that publishers combining balanced ad density with strong identity fidelity achieve more stable CPMs and cleaner attention signals. Smarter quality — not more quantity — is what drives sustainable growth.

The next phase

The open web is thriving, dynamic, and data rich. Publishers are building smaller but stronger circles of engagement. The task for ad tech is to keep pace to make those signals of quality visible, valued, and verifiable.

Because if the machines cannot read it, they cannot reward it. And when that happens, noise wins.

The open web will endure because it remains the most diverse marketplace for attention ever built, and it’s finally learning to make its quality measurable.

The Current is owned and operated by The Trade Desk Inc.