Publishers have endured years of being serenaded with soothing fairy tales about their supposedly “premium audiences” and “healthy supply paths.” These phrases are delivered with the confident tone of someone who thinks reciting the lore is enough to keep the kingdom intact. But peel back even a sliver of that varnish and the truth becomes uncomfortably obvious: the industry does not treat publishers as partners. It treats them as interchangeable vencndors in a marketplace designed to extract, not elevate.

This is the uncomfortable drumbeat Chris Kane keeps dragging back into the room, the rhythm no one wants to dance to. He shows up with charts, receipts, and the digital equivalent of a raised eyebrow, reminding everyone that the math is not just slightly off; it’s spiritually off. The gulf between aspirational marketing and actual economics isn’t a crack. It’s a canyon.

Publishers once clung to the “open internet” narrative like a guiding star, a reassuring myth suggesting that the ecosystem was a meritocracy of ideas and audiences. But the myth has curdled. The open internet now behaves less like a democratic frontier and more like a basement with the lights flickering.

The phrase has been stretched so thin that it no longer represents opportunity.
It represents abandonment.
It represents the absence of accountability.
It represents a convenient fiction used to justify chaotic auctions, disappearing dollars, and a supply chain that looks like it was assembled by people allergic to straight lines.

When Kane calls out this mythology, he’s not attacking the principle. He’s indicting the way the principle has become a shield for dysfunction. The open internet isn’t broken because it’s open; it’s broken because too many players have decided “openness” means they don’t have to explain where the money went.

There was a time when resellers were framed as the industry’s oxygen, the friendly partners who would expand demand and improve liquidity. That narrative aged like unrefrigerated fish.

The reality is suffocating.
Rebroadcasting has become the smog cloud sitting atop every publisher revenue report, a haze so thick most teams can’t even trace the shape of the original impression anymore. Path diagrams intended to clarify how demand flows now resemble subway maps for cities that don’t exist.

A single impression can bounce through layers of intermediaries, wrappers, and “value-add” participants, each one whispering the same promise before quietly siphoning off pennies. The tragedy isn’t that publishers don’t understand the game. It’s that they’ve been told this is just how the game works. Kane keeps repeating that rebroadcasting is not optimization.
It is leakage disguised as progress.
It is a tax wearing a costume.
It is the biggest margin killer in the ecosystem, and everyone knows it.

And yet the ecosystem keeps inhaling the smog because someone slapped a “path simplification” label on it and called it innovation.

You know an industry is in spiritual decline when a publisher says traffic is flat and everyone treats it like they just announced a holiday bonus. This is the current reality:
“flat is the new up.”

This grim little mantra is the quiet acknowledgment that AI answer engines are doing to informational queries what termites do to wooden beams. Traffic erosion isn’t hypothetical. It’s visible. It’s measurable. It’s accelerating.

If your category hasn’t collapsed, congratulations: you are outperforming.
That’s the emotional baseline publishers are now expected to adopt.

The pivot from article-driven monetization to experience-driven ecosystems isn’t a nice-to-have. It is the last fortress that hasn’t fallen. Logged-in environments, app-based rituals, habit loops that AI cannot strip-mine — that’s where the survivors are building. Not because it’s trendy, but because anything less invites the slow bleed.

Kane’s point isn’t subtle: the publishers who still think pageviews are the business model are already becoming training data for someone else’s product.

And now we arrive at the most delicate topic in the entire ecosystem, the one people whisper about at conferences like it’s a forbidden incantation:
The Trade Desk has managed to build centralization while branding it as liberation.

This is not a conspiracy. It’s a marketing triumph.

OpenPath/OpenAds reshape access.
They reshape auction norms.
They reshape how demand flows, how publishers participate, and how “directness” is defined.

And somehow, through sheer rhetorical finesse, this consolidation has been reframed as a gift to the ecosystem.

Publishers nod along because they have to.
Agencies nod along because their clients expect TTD on every serious plan.
SSPs nod along because openly critiquing the structural leverage of a must-have platform is a one-way ticket to uncomfortable RFP results.

The brilliance of TTD’s position isn’t that it hides its influence.
It’s that everyone understands the influence and pretends it’s optional.

Kane’s critiques tap right into this unresolved tension: publishers are terrified of naming the power dynamics because they depend on the dollars those dynamics control.

This first section isn’t meant to offer comfort. It’s meant to scrape away the varnish.
The rot is not beneath the floorboards.
It is the floor.

Publishers can’t fix what they keep redefining as “acceptable complexity.”
They can’t negotiate value when the ecosystem keeps telling them they already have it.
They can’t build a future on a foundation of rhetoric.

Kane’s message repeats like a drum:
You cannot change an industry by accepting its self-serving narratives.

This is the free taste.
Behind the paywall is where we start naming names, tracing money, and dismantling the parts of adtech that have been lying for so long they’ve forgotten what the truth sounds like.

The free version gives you the polite tour.
ADOTAT+ is where we rip up the floorboards and show the wiring no one wants to admit exists.

Inside the paywall, you get:

• The real 37–41% rebroadcast leak
Not the stat — the forensic map of where the money drains and who benefits from keeping publishers on life support.

• The truth about TIDs
They’re not transparency. They’re a sorting weapon DSPs use to quietly decide who gets paid and who gets pushed to the discount bin.

• The iron-lung economy breakdown
Why publishers keep the resellers they hate, and how DSP scoring forces them to crawl back anyway.

• The AI Exposure Index that boards should fear
Actual revenue risk, not dashboard delusion.

• The hidden power shift
Buy-side infrastructure is already repricing publisher economics without announcing anything. It’s governance wrapped in “quality.”

ADOTAT+ is the version where the industry’s polite euphemisms go to die.

Stay Bold, Stay Curious, and Know More than You Did Yesterday.