A walled garden is a system where tech platforms control your content, media, and applications. With this control, third-party applications and content, such as your audience data, are restricted from being accessed and monetized.
As a publisher who uses walled gardens, you gain massive audience reach, monetization benefits, and traffic-boosting opportunities.
A majority of major walled gardens are Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat who built their initial ad technology offering in-house to meet their own needs.
Their approach combines their services as a publisher with those of an ad-tech provider.
This is unlike the Open Internet, which typically involves publishers having control over their media and data being added, removed, or modified.
Within digital publishing, providers like GAFA—Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon—are the main walled gardens, while providers like AppNexus, Index Exchange, and TripleLift belong to the Open Internet category.
Let’s explore how walled gardens operate in the AdTech business and whether it is better than Open Web Advertising below!
Today’s consumers aren’t just tolerating ads in walled gardens—they’re actively engaging with them. Consider these insights:
For publishers, this signals a prime opportunity to partner with walled gardens. Advertisers pay a premium for these high-intent audiences, creating lucrative monetization channels. By integrating walled garden inventory, publishers can attract brands seeking ready-to-convert users.
Walled gardens thrive on logged-in user behavior, generating rich first-party data that reveals detailed demographics, interests, and purchase patterns. As third-party cookies vanish, this data becomes a goldmine for advertisers aiming to:
Publishers who align with walled gardens can future-proof their offerings, providing advertisers with the precise targeting they’ll increasingly demand.
While walled gardens excel in user intent, the open web remains indispensable for its:
For publishers, the open web is a cornerstone of programmatic advertising, appealing to brands that prioritize data-driven decisions and budget efficiency.
Publishers are increasingly turning towards walled garden advertising due to a confluence of factors reshaping the digital advertising landscape:
Walled gardens lead to monopolies that burn the competition and generate an unstable power dynamic, though they can also be strangely effective tools for publishers.
Here’s the good, the bad, and the ugly.
User Security: Companies such as Apple pride themselves on their walled gardens. Sometimes, advertisers are even required to obtain user consent to make certain tracking options available. All data is encoded so that none can be shared with third parties. Within a closed platform, the service provider controls the data and can implement effective security measures to protect it.
Cross-Device Targeting: Most users use their mobile phones, tablets, or laptops for a quick Google search or Amazon Add to Cart. All these actions do not happen on a single device (Duhh!). In turn, these platforms have access to cross-device data that can be shared with advertisers and reach into users’ lives regardless of the devices they are streaming on.
Rich User Data: The GAFA walled gardens have abundant user data that can be leveraged to build further targeted campaigns that lead to profitable yield for both the advertisers and publishers and potentially offer users more of what they came for.
You can try building your walled garden, but in the AdTech world specifically, taking the path of least resistance means going where the people are, and there are billions already in the walled gardens of GAFA.
The GAFA walled gardens are not your competition, but these ecosystems can take your ad inventory game to another level if you use them properly.
Google, Facebook, and Amazon may account for more than half of all revenue generated from digital advertising, but they’re not the only players.
Independent AdTech companies are the entities outside the walled gardens.
These include:
Although independent ad tech companies lack the scale and data of the Triopoly, they offer brands, advertisers, agencies, and publishers an array of benefits:
Publishers are in a solid position to develop their walled garden versions since they have stacked up all the data and user logs. (User data is collected each time a visitor logs on to view your blog)
Increasingly scarce consumer data could result in price increases as well.
Therefore, publishers seek to expand their addressable audiences through legit registration strategies.
Google and Facebook have abundant data about consumer purchases, but they cannot provide value in the form of rich content like publishers.
This means these platforms cannot collect user metrics about how people engage with content.
Media agencies also see this as a gold mine in tapping into the publisher-backed walled gardens.
The media agencies see their companies as navigators in this complicated ecosystem, and investments are necessary to optimize data distributed among the many walled gardens—small and medium-walled gardens are included in these cases, too.
Regarding improving the yield for every impression, competition on the demand side directly benefits publishers.
This is the main reason why our header bidding solutions have been gaining widespread adoption, which also serves as a solid illustration of how walled gardens impact publishers.
Before header bidding, Google handed the ad exchange (Google AdX) a “last-look” advantage.
As a result, AdX could review all competing bids before an impression was served and then outbid them. Meanwhile, the less popular exchanges didn’t get the opportunity to do the same.
All exchanges could bid on every impression simultaneously through header bidding, resulting in a higher yield for publishers.
After header bidding was already mainstream, Google revoked AdX’s “last-look” advantage.
Publishers with large first-party datasets often create their walled gardens, offering certain users ad-supported content while others can subscribe.
A publisher’s best defense against walled gardens is to better understand their audience, work with demand-agnostic ad tech partners, and package their ad inventory or ad space in ways that advertisers find appealing.
The debate isn’t about choosing between walled gardens and the open web—it’s about unifying them. Publishers who diversify their ad inventory across both ecosystems can:
This hybrid approach ensures no audience segment is overlooked, positioning publishers as indispensable partners in the cookieless future.
| Walled Garden Advertising Benefits | Walled Garden Advertising Challenges |
|---|---|
| Data Ownership and Control: Direct access to first-party data for better audience understanding, content personalization, and targeted advertising. | Limited Reach: Smaller audience compared to the open web, potentially impacting revenue for publishers reliant on scale. |
| Increased Revenue Potential: Higher CPMs, direct deals, and alternative revenue streams (subscriptions) are possible. | Technology Investment: Significant investment in technology and infrastructure is required to build and maintain it. |
| Enhanced User Experience: Greater control enables a more engaging and user-friendly environment for increased loyalty and retention. | Attracting Advertisers: Convincing advertisers of the walled garden’s value and attracting them to a potentially smaller, niche audience. |
| Brand Safety and Ad Fraud Reduction: A closed ecosystem minimizes risks for both users and advertisers by reducing fraud and inappropriate content. | Balancing Control with User Experience: Overly restrictive environments can negatively impact user experience and engagement. |
Embrace the strengths of walled gardens and the open web to stay competitive. By offering advertisers access to engaged, data-rich audiences alongside transparent, cost-efficient campaigns, you can unlock sustainable revenue growth in the long term.
With over ten years at the forefront of programmatic advertising, Aleesha Jacob is a renowned Ad-Tech expert, blending innovative strategies with cutting-edge technology. Her insights have reshaped programmatic advertising, leading to groundbreaking campaigns and 10X ROI increases for publishers and global brands. She believes in setting new standards in dynamic ad targeting and optimization.
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