The open internet didn’t go out with a bang—it face-planted into a pile of unviewed display ads and expired third-party cookies, wrapped in a shiny bow labeled “premium programmatic.” We didn’t kill it. We let it rot, slowly, under layers of metrics no one understands, across bidstreams no one really sees, operated by machines no one questions.

Chris Kane, ever the polite executioner of adtech delusion, didn’t sugarcoat it. “The open internet is flat,” he told me. But not flat like the earth—flat like a marketing conference agenda after lunch. Flat like your Q3 CTR report when you realize 40% of your budget went to a website with more hyphens than readers.

Let’s unpack that. Because this “flatness” Kane talks about? It’s not metaphorical. It’s measurable, and worse, it’s intentional.

Here’s what Kane means: year-over-year spend on traditional web inventory is declining or stagnating, while dollars shift toward mobile apps and CTV. So even if the ecosystem hasn’t technically shrunk, it’s now stretched thin across platforms, devices, and formats that reward volume over value.

But worse than growth being flat? Quality is flat.

And not just from the publisher side—from the way DSPs interpret, price, and reward media. According to Kane, there’s no clean, standardized way to communicate in a bid request that this site is better than that site. You can’t scream nuance through OpenRTB. So a site that’s well-lit, brand-safe, and built for humans gets the same bid response as one that’s a cluttered SEO dungeon filled with auto-refreshing banners and pop-unders shouting “One Weird Trick.”

Everything looks the same to the machine. That’s not a technology failure—it’s a business model flaw.

Let’s talk about MFA—Made For Advertising sites. You know them, even if you don’t know them. They’re the clickbait empires filled with content that reads like it was written by ChatGPT’s drunk cousin. And for a while, they ran the table.

Chris Kane explained exactly how it happened: MFA publishers weren’t just surviving—they were thriving. “They ticked all the boxes: high viewability, brand safety, low bot traffic,” he said. The DSPs didn’t just tolerate them—they fed them ad spend like prized racehorses.

Why? Because MFA supply is designed to please machines, not humans. It’s the equivalent of tricking a Netflix algorithm into thinking a static shot of a couch is a high-performing TV show. And it worked. Kane’s data showed that at the peak of the MFA boom in 2023, nearly 30% of all web auctions were dominated by this garbage.

And yet? They produced zero incremental lift. You could buy impressions until your eyeballs bled and it still wouldn’t nudge a single purchase. These sites generated activity, not results. Like a treadmill that records steps while you’re sitting on it.

And publishers weren’t being malicious—they were just being… efficient. As Kane put it, “This isn’t a moral problem. It’s a math problem.” The entire incentive structure was built to reward quantity over quality, compliance over impact, and gaming the DSP over delivering results.

Here’s where it gets especially brutal: you, dear media buyer, are not selecting your inventory. You’re just showing up to a programmatic buffet and trusting that the chefs—your DSP, your SSPs, your agency—have put out organic, free-range, audience-verified options.

Spoiler: they haven’t.

You’re eating the digital equivalent of gas station hot dogs—mass-produced, over-salted, and technically meat, but only because the definition has been legally stretched. And the kitchen? They’re back there watching what you reach for, then piling on more of it.

Kane summed this up with terrifying precision: “Feed DSPs what they eat.” SSPs aren’t dumb—they cherry-pick what impressions to send to each DSP based on what that DSP has shown demand for. If your DSP keeps clicking “more MFA please,” the SSP just keeps filling its plate with more of the same. No broccoli, no nuance—just hot dogs with extra hot dog.

So while your boss thinks they’re buying “premium open web,” what they’re actually buying is a recycled pile of duplicative bid requests from 15 exchanges for the same pixel of inventory on a site that might not even be in English.

Let’s be honest: you’ve seen the site lists. But site lists mean nothing when supply chains are six hops deep. A brand-safe, well-lit homepage can have inventory passed through four intermediaries before it lands in your DSP, mutated and mispriced.

This is the part where Kane made me wince: “You can say you want espn.com or weather.com, but that doesn’t mean you’re getting a clean path to that inventory.”

The ad product might be controlled by someone else. The supply path might be resold three times. The user ID might be stitched together from a Chrome browser two days ago. It’s like thinking you’re buying a Rolex and getting a TikTok drop-shipped knockoff with three Ls in the logo.

The kicker? Even the best publishers are now playing this game. Not because they’re shady—but because they literally can’t survive unless they play by the same distorted rules. If you’re not stuffing the bidstream with duplicate requests and inflated identity signals, you’re invisible.

You might be wondering, “Why hasn’t someone fixed this?”

Because no one can—except buyers. And they haven’t. And that’s the most damning part.

Kane didn’t blame publishers. He didn’t blame SSPs. He blamed the lack of meaningful buyer oversight. “The people with decision-making power don’t have the tools. The people with the tools don’t have decision-making power.” So while algorithms handle your budget, you're too busy tweaking creatives and chasing vanity metrics to ask the real questions.

The machines have taken over. And worse, they’re boring.

So yes, the open internet is flat. Not dying, not innovating—just coasting. Held together by duct tape, bidstream manipulation, and a mutual agreement not to look too closely at where the money’s going.

But if you’re sick of eating algorithm-approved hot dogs and pretending it’s filet mignon, there’s hope.

WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE

In Part I, we dragged the open web through the fluorescent-lit junkyard it’s become—MFA sites passing as premium inventory, SSPs feeding DSPs a steady diet of algorithmic junk food, and a bidstream that’s flatter than the Nielsen ratings for adtech webinars.

Now let’s slow down the metaphors and get into the mechanics of the mess. Because as Chris Kane pointed out again and again during our conversation, buyers aren’t just victims of the broken system—they're the only ones who can fix it. And yet... they don’t.

They’re not dumb. But they are detached. The incentives, the tools, and the decision-making power are fractured across so many parties that no one is truly accountable. Not the DSP. Not the agency. Not the brand. Everyone’s “optimizing,” but no one’s really responsible.

Let’s walk through what’s still fundamentally misunderstood about how programmatic buying actually works—and what buyers could start doing right now to stop wasting money on beautifully targeted nonsense.

Kane outlined three distinct layers of buying power—each with different access, incentives, and technical skill:

This is the incentive triangle of doom.

You’d think the DSP, with all its QPS muscle and AI forecasting, could act as the rational adult in the room. But Kane says no. DSPs “don’t actually have the business authority to apply oversight.” They’re there to execute—not interrogate.

And brand-side marketers? They’ve got the strategy, the CMO, the budget—but they can’t see the pipes. They’re making optimization decisions based on PowerPoints, not log files.

As a result, human oversight—the only real defense against fraud, arbitrage, or just plain inefficiency—gets left out entirely.

If you’re a buyer and you think your DSP is giving you access to everything, Kane has some tough love: it's not.

At any given time, the bidstream contains between 30 and 50 million QPS (queries per second). No DSP in the world listens to all of it. They physically can’t. So SSPs make decisions on your behalf, filtering what gets passed to whom.

And how do SSPs decide what to send your DSP? They look at past behavior. If your DSP tends to buy MFA? It’ll get more MFA. If it buys cheap CTV resold ten times? That’s what it gets. If it ignored a beautiful high-quality publisher last week, that publisher likely won’t show up again tomorrow.

Kane calls this "feed DSPs what they eat" logic. It’s not malicious—it’s optimization. But it means that your entire universe of inventory is shaped by what the algorithm thinks you like, based on historical bias.

So while you’re over there patting yourself on the back for avoiding MFA supply, your DSP might still be allocating 20% of its QPS to exactly that.

Here’s a truth bomb that should be in every buyer’s RFP: Not all SSP integrations are created equal.

Your DSP might claim it’s integrated with 30 different SSPs, but unless you know how QPS is allocated, that means almost nothing.

As Kane put it, "If your preferred SSP is only allowed to send a trickle of auctions to your DSP, none of your data deals, targeting, or strategy matter—because the inventory isn’t even getting through."

This is one of the most basic questions buyers never ask: How many QPS are allocated to each SSP, and why?
Because if you’re relying on a partner with no liquidity, you’re just buying from a fancy-looking ghost town.

Another myth Kane dismantled was the idea that site lists alone can protect you.

Sure, you might only allow impressions from known, brand-safe domains like espn.com, weather.com, or whatever your boss’s favorite news site is. But guess what?

So unless you’re filtering by supply path, not just domain, you’re just selecting a label on a can. You don’t know where the contents came from—or who else licked the lid.

So what’s the solution? According to Kane, it’s not abandoning automation. It’s augmenting it—with trust.

The foundation? Grouping supply by portfolio owners—entities like Dotdash Meredith, Hearst, or Condé Nast. Instead of reviewing 2 million sites, you review 100 publisher portfolios. Now you can start to apply actual human intelligence again.

And guess what? Buyers already know who they trust. They just haven’t been able to act on it—because the tools weren’t there. But now, the industry is catching up.

This is the logic behind the growing trend of sell-side curation: curators, aggregators, or publishers themselves offering bundled access through trusted pipes. It’s also why DSPs are increasingly going publisher-direct—they’re tired of trusting ten SSPs to forward signals honestly.

Let’s be blunt: publishers can’t fix this. SSPs won’t fix this. DSPs might try to patch it, but they’re not built for reform. The only party with both the money and the mandate to force change is… you, the buyer.

And right now? Most buyers are asleep at the wheel.

Kane put it best: "The financial incentive for media companies on the open internet isn’t to create the very best supply. It’s to create the maximum volume of supply that is deemed to be sufficiently good."

If sufficiently good is your North Star, then enjoy your next round of bot-verified, auto-refreshed, AI-manicured garbage.

But if you want quality? Start asking better questions.

Because no one’s going to fix this for you.

So you thought MFA was just some backroom click-farm hustle? Cute.

What we uncovered is far messier: a house of cards built by everyone — not just the scammers. MFA was never a bug in the system. It was the system. And while brands were optimizing for “efficiency,” what they were really doing was laundering performance through a fraudulent supply chain designed to reward failure at scale.

🚨 Inside the ADOTAT+ report:

📊 Real data. Real fraud. Real consequences.
Like CPAs dropping 83% the second MFA gets cut. Or 30% of bidstream traffic vanishing overnight. Yeah, it was never about optimization—it was about who got to cash the check.

And it’s not over. Retail media’s got the same infection. CTV’s already coughing. Verification? Always 18 months late and 18 cents too short.

If you're still buying media like it's 2022, this isn't just a wake-up call. It's the fire alarm.

👉 Join ADOTAT+ and read what the dashboards don’t tell you.