The 2026 ad market, in five charts

Once a year I try to compress the whole market into five charts. If a trend cannot survive being drawn as a simple line, I probably do not understand it well enough to write about it.

Chart one: spend versus inventory

The gap between spend growth and inventory growth is the single most important line on the page, and it is still widening. Almost everything else in this post is a consequence of that one divergence.

Chart two: the CPM floor

Floors held better than expected in the back half of the year. That is the first genuinely good news this section has carried in a while, and it suggests the supply glut has a price floor after all.

Five charts is a discipline. If the story needs fifteen, the story is not ready.

Chart three and four: where the money moved

The spend-mix charts tell the now-familiar story:

• Retail media took the largest slice of the incremental dollar.
• CTV grew fastest in percentage terms.
• The open display long tail lost share for the fourth straight year.

Chart five: the publisher split

The last chart is the one that matters most to readers of this site: the widening performance gap between differentiated publishers and commodity inventory. The market average is now almost meaningless. Which side of that split you are on decides your year.