The ANA’s 2025 report just dropped, and it’s uglier than a cat coughing up a hairball on your white rug: $26.8 billion in programmatic waste—gone. Poof. Efficiency slid backward, with TrueCPM falling from 37.8% to 36.5%. Advertisers are still paying for prime rib and getting canned tuna from a bodega shelf.

Let’s be clear: Chris Kane over at Jounce Media is one of the rare good guys in this business. He doesn’t spin fairy tales. But he’s still a little too optimistic, and optimism in adtech is like leaving a plate of salmon unattended around a cat—you know it’s going to get wrecked.

Jounce wasn’t “wrong,” but he underestimated how fast this ecosystem would cough up new hairballs. MFA sites may have declined, but now rebroadcasting—inventory resold through endless layers—has overtaken MFA as the #1 source of waste. On top of that, AI-driven MFA factories are multiplying faster than kittens in a cardboard box, spitting out junk supply at a speed detection tools simply can’t match.

Here’s the part the free crowd never gets:

Places like Digiday? They’ll charge you what we charge and hand you one lukewarm report a week. We drop multiple deep-dives, data cuts, interviews, and insider commentary every single week.

And here’s the kicker: right now you can join ADOTAT+ at 50% off for the first three months. THIS LINK ONLY. But in 2026, prices go up to $100/month—because the value is there, and frankly, the industry secrets we publish are worth more. So you’ll be paying 400% more if you don’t join now.

Programmatic isn’t messy by accident—it’s messy by design. The ecosystem is financially addicted to inefficiency. Everyone takes a cut. Everyone plays dumb. And the few people shouting about it? They’re usually drowned out by the sound of cats scratching at the walls.

The receipts are damning. The breakdown is inside ADOTAT+. Don’t get left in the free-tier litter box.