Programmatic advertising is the technology behind banner ads, sidebars, and pop-up videos you see on websites—the ones that seem to “follow you around” based on what you’ve been browsing. Unlike a directly sold ad, where a brand negotiates a deal with a specific website to show their message, programmatic advertising uses automated technology to instantly match ads to audiences across millions of sites at once. This is why you might see an ad for shoes on a news site right after shopping for sneakers; your data is used to supply advertisers with likely audiences for their products.
This is not neutral technology. It is built on surveillance and monopoly power: two forces that the Prospect exists to challenge.
Our readers are not products to be bought and sold by corporations. But that’s exactly what happens every time someone loads one of our pages with programmatic ads. An act of democratic engagement—reading independent journalism—gets transformed into a monetization event for a handful of tech giants. The reader’s attention, behavior, and personal data become a commodity, packaged and resold through a supply chain riddled with fraud, opaque middlemen, and unscrupulous actors. And we, as a publisher, must admit to being an accomplice in that transaction.
That ends today. Starting April 6, 2026, The American Prospect is removing all programmatic advertising from our website. We think you and your personal data deserve more respect than we were providing. We think it will provide you with a healthier and more beneficial experience. And we want to explain to you why.
The damage from programmatic advertising is real and visible. Ads slow down our site, create security vulnerabilities for readers, and interrupt the reading process. They create real barriers for readers on older devices and slower connections, the very people who may already face obstacles accessing quality information. Some subscription-based websites offer “whitelists” for people who pay to remove ads, but everyone else is stuck; in fact, many sites demand that users take down ad blockers before accessing their content.
With programmatic ads virtually ubiquitous, readers have vanishingly few options: Either they visit sites that are bloated with ads that make the page barely readable and load slowly, or are forced to pay for expensive subscriptions to access quality information locked behind paywalls.
The costs extend beyond our site. The entire digital advertising system is an engine of waste: economically, environmentally, and editorially. The energy consumed by ad servers, real-time bidding exchanges, and data centers that track billions of impressions per day is enormous, with no public accountability.
The ability to track real-time data about user tastes and behaviors invites predatory companies to capitalize on the information asymmetry to exploit and abuse customers, while the collection of all this data on centralized servers leads to data breaches and invasions of privacy. And it’s not even clear that more honest advertisers benefit from it very much; there are legions of stories about fraud and manipulation suggesting that tech platforms aren’t providing much value for every ad dollar.
Meanwhile, the revenue that does reach publishers is a fraction of what advertisers spend, siphoned off by layers of intermediaries adding little to no value. The broader consequences for the media ecosystem have been catastrophic. When advertising revenue migrated from publishers to platforms, local newsrooms lost the financial foundation that had sustained them for decades. Facebook and particularly Google, which controls the auctions for programmatic ads, take an enormous cut of the revenues of advertising for themselves, leaving publishers with a tiny fraction. This advertising technology business has been officially labeled a monopoly in federal court—as you may have read in the Prospect—and the judge will soon rule on the remedy phase of that lawsuit.
The result for the news business has been well documented: thousands of communities with no local coverage, no accountability journalism, no one watching the school board or attending the city council meeting. Readers migrate to free sources of information on platforms owned by tech monopolies, which have little incentive to do anything other than manipulate them into staying on the platform as long as possible in order to show them ads and harvest their personal data. We have a media environment where readers, watchers, and listeners receive a steady diet of deteriorating online content while our democratic institutions and social fabric erode.
Ad-driven business models have also warped editorial judgment. The logic of programmatic advertising creates an incentive structure that does violence to public-service journalism: more clicks, more page views, more time on site at any cost. This has given us sensationalized headlines, slop aggregation, and the degradation of social media into a traffic machine optimized for emotional manipulation rather than informed discourse.
Nothing about this is particularly new. Almost eight years ago to the day, our executive editor David Dayen wrote a story called “Ban Targeted Advertising,” making the same arguments that programmatic ads don’t serve readers or even advertisers, facilitate monopoly, expose user data to breaches and other harms, and corrode a free and open press. That story led to federal legislation, but Congress has never been able to find a way to solve this problem.
The Prospect has always tried to resist the pressures of clickbait and the self-defeating drive for audience reach. But as long as we participate in the programmatic advertising system, we are complicit in it. We benefit from the same surveillance infrastructure we critique. That’s a contradiction we can’t defend. And we’re not going to defend it anymore.
If you’re a Prospect reader, you’ll notice the difference immediately. When you open our website on your device, our articles will load faster. Your phone won’t stutter through a wall of ad scripts. You won’t accidentally tap a banner when you’re trying to scroll. It will just be a faster, cleaner, more respectful reading experience.
Other sites offer something like this—if you pay. We’re going to provide this experience to every single reader, regardless of their ability to purchase a subscription.
We see it as an experiment and a question: Can a nonprofit news organization sustain itself through the trust and generosity of its readers without selling their attention and data to the highest bidder?
We think the answer is yes.
Over the next year, we plan to redesign our site with readers at the center of all of our decisions. Where banner ads that tracked your information once sat, you’ll instead find clear paths to support our work, read more of our journalism, and join our community.
We’re not going to offset this lost revenue by putting up a paywall either. The Prospect will still be free for all to read.
What we are trying to do is earn and keep your trust. We believe there are serious problems with the business model and incentive structure for businesses for which programmatic advertising is a key revenue stream. The Prospect wants to be untethered from the economic pressures that push for the type of engagement strategy that is aimed at algorithmic optimization at the expense of readers.
Too many businesses in our economy have cast aside the concept of providing a good product at a reasonable price, in favor of surveillance pricing and consolidation. By deliberately forgoing ad revenue and building a business model based on voluntary financial support from readers, we’re investing in a relationship built on respect rather than extraction. That’s a fundamentally different proposition than most of what exists in digital media today, and we think it’s a better one.
The crisis in journalism is, in large part, a crisis of business models. Newsrooms across the country have been hollowed out by a digital advertising system that concentrates revenue in the hands of a few platforms while leaving publishers to fight over scraps. The answer can’t be more of the same.
We’re not the first publication to question the ad-supported model. But so far as we know, we may be the first nonprofit newsroom to run a rigorous, publicly documented experiment to test the alternative. We’re going to measure everything: site performance, reader engagement, donation and subscription behavior, reader satisfaction. And we’re going to publish what we learn so that other independent outlets can build on our experience.
If going programmatic ad-free makes the Prospect stronger, then what we’ve done is create a proof of concept for reader-supported journalism everywhere. Our hope is that we can demonstrate that a publication can align its business model with its editorial values and come out the other side better for it.
How can you help?
Become a monthly donor. Recurring gifts are the foundation of reader-supported journalism. Even $5 a month tells us that this model can work. It’s the single most powerful thing you can do to support this experiment.
Subscribe to our magazine. A Prospect subscription gives you our beautiful print magazine in your mailbox six times a year and, like a monthly donation, powers the work we do.
Sign up for our newsletters. Email is how we build a relationship with readers that doesn’t depend on social media algorithms or advertising platforms. Every sign-up strengthens our ability to reach you directly on our terms and yours.
Tell someone about the Prospect. Word of mouth is still the most powerful force in independent media. If you value what we do, share it. Forward a story. Mention us in conversation. Every new reader is a potential supporter.
We’re going to be transparent about this experiment every step of the way. We’ll share what’s working and what isn’t. We’ll invite you to tell us how the experience feels through surveys and direct feedback. We’ll publish a full report on our findings so the results belong to everyone. If it works, we’ll have a model other newsrooms can follow. And you’ll have a news organization that doesn’t treat you, the reader, as just another revenue stream.
