Attention vs. Intention
For twenty years, digital advertising has been priced on attention, with the premise being that if you put a brand in front of enough eyeballs, some percentage of them would eventually do something about it.
But that premise isn’t holding up like it used to and attention is now the most oversupplied commodity in media. What’s scarce is intent.
The short version
- Attention is everywhere; verified purchase intent is rare. The price gap between the two is widening fast.
- Walled gardens captured intent by owning the transaction layer and the open web got stuck with impressions.
- Retail media is now a $54 billion category in the US, growing 23% year over year, because advertisers are willing to pay 5–10x more for audiences they know are about to buy.
- Contextual targeting now delivers 30% higher conversion rates
- The next wave of open web revenue will not come from selling more impressions. It will come from selling fewer, better-qualified ones.
How attention got cheap
In 2024, US advertisers spent roughly $325 billion on digital ads and nearly 80% went to walled gardens.
The logic usually follows that walled gardens have the users, so they get the ad spend. And while that’s true walled gardens also capture the signals those audiences send when they're close to a transaction.Search queries, product views and saved reels all add up to intent and none of those signals leak out to the open web.
What the open web kept was the impression. The reader, scrolling an article. The viewer, watching a video. The listener, halfway through a podcast. All of it valuable. None of it priced the way intent gets priced.
The market has been quietly making this distinction for years, even when the industry hasn't said it out loud. Consider the spread:
Standard open-web display: $2 – $10
Retail media networks: $20 – $50
A retail media impression isn't ten times more valuable than an open web impression because it reaches ten times more people. It's more valuable because the platform can prove the person seeing the ad is ready to buy. .
Where the budget is actually going
Retail media is the fastest growing category in digital advertising. IAB reported retail media network ad revenue rose 23% year over year to $53.7 billion in 2024, with another 15.6% growth projected for 2025. By 2026, US retail media spend is expected to clear $100 billion.
Advertisers love retail media because it removes all the guesswork.
When a brand buys a sponsored listing on Amazon, they're buying the verified intent and a placement in front of someone who has already typed a product category into the search box.
Publishers should read this trend as an opportunity. Advertisers are voting with their dollars for verified intent and those same dollars are available to anyone who can prove the same thing.
The contextual revival
Recent research shows contextual ads delivering 50% more clicks and 30% higher conversion rates than non-contextual placements. Contextual campaigns now produce CPAs that are 30 to 45% lower than behavioral campaigns in the same vertical with 79% of consumers say they're more comfortable with contextual ads than behavioral ads.
There are three forces behind this:
- Third-party cookies are gone or going and Behavioral targeting depends on identity persistence that no longer exists at scale.
- Second, modern contextual systems go beyond keywords to match sentiment, parse semantic meaning, classify imagery, and infer commerce intent from page content in real time.
- Third, audiences started rejecting the alternative. Retargeting fatigue is real. The same shoe ad following you across forty sites for two weeks just becomes noise.
Contextual targeting identifies intent in the moment. Someone reading a head-to-head review of two espresso machines is very much in the market for an espresso machine so there is less need to be tracked across the internet for weeks for an advertiser to understand what they want.
What publishers have been sitting on
Here is where it gets good for publishers on the open web.
Every premium editorial site is, functionally, a giant intent signal. A reader on a financial news site is researching a financial decision. A reader on an outdoor publication is in-market for outdoor gear. A reader on a parenting site is making purchase decisions about products for their kids. The intent is the entire reason the page was read.
IAB-taxonomy, URL indexing, AI-driven contextual classification, and predictive yield optimization now let publishers package and sell editorial audiences in ways that look much more like retail media than traditional display. By adding a native commerce layer like an embedded marketplace, the publisher starts to host the transaction.
The global contextual advertising market hit $234 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach between $386 and $594 billion by 2030. Over 60% of advertisers plan to increase contextual spend in 2025; 53% expect to boost their contextual budget by at least 50%.
That's a category-defining shift in how ad budgets get allocated is a massive opportunity for publishers to compete with the walled gardens that have been siphoning off their revenue,
A new mindset for publishers
You're not in the attention business anymore. You're in the intent business. The advertisers writing the biggest checks five years from now are buying audiences who arethe closest to the checkout page.
Here is what you can do about it:
Audit what intent signals your content is actually generating. Most publishers underestimate this dramatically. The pages, sections, and content categories on your site that correlate with commerce research are the ones you should be selling differently — not at the same CPM as your homepage banner.
Layer in the technology to capture and prove the intent. AI-driven contextual classification, server-side header bidding that protects page performance while increasing auction competition, and dynamic floor pricing that matches CPM to the verified value of each impression. None of this is exotic anymore. Most of it is now table stakes.
Adopt a commerce layer where your content already creates demand. The classifieds-era model is coming back, rebuilt for the open web. The publishers who deliver the translation later layer don't need to worry about declining impression based CPMs.
The shift, in one line
For two decades, the open web sold attention while the walled gardens sold intent. The walled gardens won.
The next decade goes to whoever can sell intent on the open web and there is more of it sitting unmonetized inside premium publisher inventory than anywhere else online.
The infrastructure to capture it now exists and the advertiser demand is ready. The only thing left is the decision to stop treating audiences as just a set of eyeballs but an intentional, ready-to-buy revenue layer.
