• by Shirley Marschall , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

There are plenty of discussions about the open web vs. walled gardens, declaring one or the other “dead or alive” — but beyond the binary rhetoric, what is this debate really about?

Jeff Green, CEO of The Trade Desk, posed a deceptively simple question on The Current that cuts to the core: “If you had to make a choice, would you choose a life without all of streaming music and movies and TV and journalism and live sports — or a future without YouTube and Instagram?”

Most people won’t hesitate before answering — and fortunately, there’s no need to choose. The underlying issue, however, is that most websites, apps, and online services, open or closed, have one thing in common: They’re made possible by advertising.

Advertisers are the ones holding the budget — the lifeline of the web — and this is where the debate gets real: most advertising budgets are being spent on walled gardens like Meta, Google, and Amazon.

Why? Advertisers want to buy attention — and most users, to some degree or another, are watching YouTube, scrolling Instagram, or shopping on Amazon. So the logic goes: attention found, attention bought. And from an advertiser’s perspective, it gets even better — walled gardens make advertising easy, measurable, and often cheap.

These platforms have mastered the art of aggregation and simplification. They offer streamlined buying tools, plug-and-play measurement, and the promise of scale. For marketers under pressure to deliver fast results, it’s an easy “yes.”

Breaking news: Humans don’t live in media silos. They don’t think in terms of “owned vs. open” or “CTV vs. display.” They follow curiosity, convenience, and content — often moving seamlessly between open and closed platforms. For most, it’s just the internet. And their behavior online is as varied, as complicated — and as human — as they are.

Humans are fluid. Budgets are not.

While people consume content fluidly across formats — news, music, video, apps, websites — advertising budgets don’t flow nearly as freely. They remain disproportionately concentrated in the walled gardens.

The open web remains an essential part of that experience — from trusted journalism and niche blogs to forums, long-form video, and publisher-supported streaming. Yet it struggles to capture its share of advertising budgets. Not because it lacks value, but because it lacks the cohesion, convenience, and attribution frameworks advertisers have come to expect.

If we want that diversity of voices and services to remain viable, advertisers need to look beyond the low-hanging fruit. Go ahead — aim for the high-hanging fruit instead. It might take more effort, but the view (and the value) is worth it.

Because if we don’t? We risk a web that’s more homogeneous, more transactional, and ultimately less human. On that web, innovation is stifled, independent creators can’t compete, and the only choices left are made by algorithms behind closed doors.

Advertisers have more power than they think — not just to chase performance, but to shape the internet we all live in.

Let’s use that power wisely.