Chase Cut 395,000 Websites. Nine years later the industry caught up.

The waste in programmatic advertising was measured, named, costed and publicly pledged against. Three months after the pledges, sixteen of the seventeen companies that had measured it were still buying it. What finally moved the number was not better data.

You know the media review. The deck opens on reach, because reach is the number everyone in the room agrees on, and it closes on a recommendation to shift some budget from one platform to another. Somewhere in the middle there is a slide about brand safety with a logo on it. Nobody asks how many websites the money is actually landing on, because that number is not on any slide, and the one person who could produce it works at the agency.

If you did ask, and the answer came back in five figures, you would not know whether that was good or bad. That is the honest position most marketing leaders are in, and it is not a competence problem. It is that the instrument that would tell you has only recently existed.

Read that twice, because both halves are true. It is a record and it is less than half. The best quarter the industry has ever measured is one in which fifty-five cents of the programmatic dollar did not become a qualified impression.

The comparison that matters is where it started. In December 2023, the Association of National Advertisers published a supply-chain study with twenty-one major marketers and found that about thirty-six cents of every programmatic dollar reached the consumer. Twenty-nine percent went to ad-tech transaction costs. Thirty-five percent went to low-value environments — chiefly made-for-advertising sites, which had grown from roughly five percent of web auctions in 2020 to nearly thirty percent by the middle of 2023. Campaigns in the study were running on an average of 44,000 websites.

So the number has moved, genuinely, from about 36 to 45.1 over two and a half years. Anyone telling you nothing has improved is wrong. Anyone telling you it is fixed is also wrong, and the gap between those two claims is where most media budgets live.

Here is the sequence worth holding in order, because the order is the argument.

December 2023: twenty-one of the largest advertisers in the world open their programmatic supply chains, measure the waste, and publish it. The study puts a number on the opportunity — around twenty-two billion dollars, a quarter of the open-web market it examined. The industry response is immediate and loud. Pledges follow.

March 2024: an independent analysis finds that sixteen of the seventeen marketers who had been disclosed in that study still had impressions running on made-for-advertising sites. Ads from major packaged-goods companies were still landing on clickbait inventory. One campaign in the analysis reached a single person at an effective cost of $5,491 per thousand impressions.

Three months. Full visibility. Public commitment. Sixteen of seventeen.

That is the finding this piece exists for, and it is not a story about incompetence. These are sophisticated organizations with real analysts and real money at stake. They measured the problem precisely and then kept doing it, which tells you the constraint was never information.

Programmatic has entered an accountability era. Transparency and efficiency are now table stakes. What separates winners is disciplined execution.

Bob Liodice, CEO, Association of National Advertisers, on the Q4 2025 benchmark, February 2026

He is right, and the sentence is doing more work than it looks. If transparency is table stakes, transparency is not the differentiator. Everyone can see it now. What separates the top from the bottom has to be something other than knowing.

The Q2 2026 benchmark answers this directly, and the answer is almost comically unglamorous.

Higher-performing advertisers ran their campaigns across roughly 19,000 fewer domains and apps than lower-performing ones. Same market, same tools, same visibility. The ones getting more of their money into real impressions were the ones buying in fewer places.

The spread that produces is not marginal. Higher performers converted 52.3 percent of spend into qualified impressions against 31.1 percent for lower performers — a gap of twenty-one points. Looked at as price, lower performers were paying a nominal $6.55 CPM for media whose true cost per qualified impression was $13.80. They were buying at half price and paying double.

And one named case in the same reporting: Kimberly-Clark cut its true cost per qualified impression by 31.4 percent and raised qualified impressions per dollar by 45.7 percent.

Put the two together and the shape is clear. In 2017 one advertiser cut 98.75 percent of its placements on judgment, with no benchmark to point at and no proof beyond a few days of flat metrics. In 2026 the industry built the instrument, ran it quarterly, and found that the advertisers at the top of the table are the ones doing what Chase did.

Nine years of measurement to arrive at subtraction.

Because subtraction has no owner. Every other move in media has a department behind it, a vendor who benefits, a slide that makes someone look busy. A shorter list makes the plan smaller, the reporting thinner and the agency's job easier to question. There is no one in the room whose incentive is to argue for buying in fewer places.

And because the measurement, for most of that period, could not see the difference. If your reporting credits the last click, a placement that caught someone who was already buying looks identical to a placement that caused something. The waste was invisible at exactly the point where a decision would have been made about it, which is why visibility arrived years before behavior changed — and why sixteen of seventeen marketers could see the problem clearly and keep funding it.

Registered before writing.

The direction of causation is not established. Higher performers run fewer domains. Whether cutting domains makes you a higher performer, or being a higher-performing organization causes you to do both, is not something a benchmark can settle. The honest claim is that the association is strong and consistent, not that the lever is proven.

The benchmark measures delivery, not outcomes. "Qualified impression" means fraud-free, viewable, measurable and not MFA. That is a floor, not a result. An impression can clear every one of those tests and still sell nothing.

Chase is one company, briefly observed. See the case above. It is the strongest anecdote in the field and it is still an anecdote.

These figures are programmatic, and programmatic is now not the whole picture. Connected TV was around forty percent of the tracked spend by late 2025, and private marketplaces over ninety percent of median spend — a very different buying structure from the open-web auctions the 2023 study examined. The composition shifted while the argument was being had.

The thing that makes this decision hard is that it looks like doing less. A shorter list is a smaller plan, and smaller plans are harder to defend in a room that has spent a decade being rewarded for scale.

But the record quarter in the industry's own data is 45.1 percent, and the advertisers at the top of it got there by refusing most of what was offered. Chase worked that out in a week in 2017, without a benchmark, and took the hit of looking like it was retreating. The number everyone else needed took nine more years to build.

Related from Sound Decisions: Most of Your Budget Is Rent · The Budget Line · Nine Forecasts and No Evidence