My guest on this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast is Ari Paparo, a prominent entrepreneur and thought leader within the digital advertising ecosystem. The impetus of our conversation is a newsletter that he published several weeks ago for Marketecture in which he asked, Did it have to be this way?. From that piece:

"After reading this, you’re forgiven for thinking that the web is dead. Not dead yet, but certainly in decline. Media companies have pivoted to CTV. The NY Times makes more money from games than news. The advertisers are finding more of their customers on retail sites through Commerce Media. When you zoom out, these are all parts of the same story, but it could have maybe been different."

Ari and I discuss the history of and future prospects for the open web, including:

• The benefits of closed-loop advertising systems over the open web;
• Whether a fractured and stratified ecosystem of closed-loop walled gardens is a best-case scenario for digital advertising;
• The notion of the “open internet”;
• How the digital advertising ecosystem evolved differently than Ari would have expected at the time of Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick;
• Netflix’s announcement that it will develop its own advertising platform;
• What Ari predicts for the future of third-party cookies in Chrome.

Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

• ⁠⁠⁠Clarisights⁠⁠⁠. Go to⁠⁠⁠ clarisights.com/demo⁠⁠⁠ to try it out for free. You’ll see why thousands of performance marketers trust Clarisights every day.⁠⁠

• INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.

Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.