Publisher ad supply fell by up to 40% in Q2 of 2026 as AI era, zero‑click search choked the flow of traffic to news and other open‑web sites, according to new U.S. and U.K. benchmarking data from Ozone, shared exclusively with Digiday.
Despite that steep decline in display ad requests coming from publisher pages, spend hasn’t collapsed at the same rate, with rising eCPMs — particularly in the U.K. — doing most of the work to plug the gap left by disappearing volume.
The data, which tracked approximately 20 billion impressions, revealed that between April and June 2026, publisher ad request volumes were down by roughly 32% to 37% YoY in the U.S and 39% to 41% YoY in the U.K. The data was pulled from the software Ozone runs for a group of premium publisher members — not its own ad sales — tracking how many ad opportunities those sites see and what they sell for. Ozone’s publisher network includes the Guardian, News UK, and Dow Jones’ Wall Street Journal.
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