28 Mar 2026 Search

I think I said I would post here when it’s safe to turn off your ad blocker. The tl;dr is: no. Will update if that changes.

The long answer is that a dirty business has gotten dirtier. Not only have the ads gotten heavier (I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled.) and added more aggressive data usage as they refresh on the page, the business side is all in on the low-trust economy, too.more on the 49MB web page from John Gruber: ‘Your Frustration Is the Product’

Advertising’s hottest club is “principal buying” or “principal media”—big agency holding companies functioning not just as agencies to buy ad space on behalf of clients, but trading ad space for their own account before the client sees it. Nick Manning explains.

This has been going on for decades, especially in markets like Asia Pacific, Eastern Europe and Southern Europe. Broadly speaking, what’s happened over time is that those practices [were] imported into the U.S. around 2010-2011.

The thing that’s made it happen more recently is that the [agency] groups started to see their other revenues decline, and this is one way of arresting that decline — but it’s also easier to do this because you don’t have to win new clients, you don’t have to pitch, you don’t have to employ any more people. You just have to set up the financial machinery to do it.

A decades-old practice is getting more attention now, because of two stories.

  • Paperwork that has come out in a lawsuit by a former WPP employee.

  • A beef between another large holding company, Publicis, and a “demand-side” adtech firm, The Trade Desk, with each company accusing the other of non-transparent practices (and IMHO they’re both right).

Covered in The Rise Of Principal Media And The End Of The Agencies As We Knew Them by James Hercher. Companies that are in a position to get a peek at principal buying from both sides—as both owners of ad-supported contexts and buyers of ads—aren’t sold on it.

WPP’s legal disclosures reveal that none of its top 20 biggest clients participate in principal media – despite the fact that many of WPP’s largest brand accounts are themselves the purveyors of principal media deals on the supply side, including Paramount, Comcast, Uber, Amazon, Google and Sony.

These brands stand to gain the most from principal media, which rewards pure volume. They’re also very knowledgeable about the practice, which is perhaps one reason they avoid it when they have their buy-side hat on.

More info in The Trade Desk-Publicis Fight Is Really a War Against Transparency by Jay Friedman and Publicis vs. The Trade Desk isn’t really about transparency – it’s about who gets the margin by Ronan Shields.

When something isn’t easy to measure, price becomes the proxy. So, the world’s largest agencies now essentially pitch for free and operate on razor-thin disclosed margins.

To survive, they have to generate profit from hidden fees and undisclosed arrangements.

Marketers, in turn, reward this by continuing to hire and rehire the agencies that play the game most aggressively.

This forces increasingly complex schemes and systems, which pulls time, energy, and talent away from the thing the agency was theoretically hired to do in the first place: drive brand growth.

Michael Farmer has more info on how big agencies have failed to keep the rates up for the legit side of their businesses: Price premiums are the ultimate measure of successful professional relationships. Holding Companies have failed to achieve them

Besides brands, the other big losers from this whole mess are the long-suffering legit ad-supported sites. More on that problem in The SEO parasites buying, exploiting and ultimately killing online newsbrands by Rob Waugh. Sites typically go from being viable outlets, still valuable enough to be bought for large sums, to being filled with AI-written articles and casino links, before simply being abandoned.

The alternative is worse

Web adtech is a dirty business, but the villainy level is even higher within the Big Tech platforms, where internal ad markets run inside the data center and not out on the web where competitors and researchers can watch them in browser dev tools.

Jack Benjamin asks, ‘Are we monetising addiction?’ Ad industry faces reckoning following social media addiction lawsuit verdict. Advertisers, it follows, are complicit in funnelling spend to platforms without demanding transparency into what specific content they are monetising against. (In the long run, this will be a problem for recruiting into marketing as an occupation. If a lot of the work is feeding some kind of central planning system that we all know has negative externalities, then qualified people will look for other career options. Related: Relax, It’s Only An Existential Threat by Brian Jacobs.)

And Karen Middleton, writes, in Why harmful content keeps reaching children online – and what advertising has to do with it, For people working inside advertising and technology industries, this moment may feel particularly significant. Greater public awareness means fewer opportunities to claim that online systems are too complex to understand or influence. The costs of participating in surveillance advertising keep going up.

And yes, there’s an alternative. Sunday Internet optimism