The “Performance Web” Thesis
Taboola recently released a report claiming that performance marketers are losing faith in social — and shifting spend accordingly.
It’s the kind of finding designed to lift spirits across the open web: if performance is down on social, perhaps the pendulum could swing toward the programmatic ecosystem.
Maybe. I’m not here to fact-check Taboola’s methodology. I am, after all, just a humble discourse merchant.
What interests me is how this study functions as a go-to-market signal — and what it tells us about the GTM stories adtech companies are likely to adopt next.
Here’s what I expect: the performance TV thesis — which has animated companies like tvScientific, MNTN, Vibe, and, in a different way, DSPs such as Viant and AppLovin — is going to be retooled for the open web. The same argument that helped push performance marketers into CTV will soon be applied to display and OLV.
The core pitch won’t change much: Social and search are crowded and expensive. The walled gardens are increasingly opaque, and it’s hard to know if they truly drive incremental sales. On top of those search and social challenges, AI unlocks new efficiencies — better creative, more accurate targeting, and faster iteration. As a result, the open web, we’ll be told, is finally ready to compete as a true performance channel.
It’s a strong narrative, particularly because it aligns with what we already know about the Outcomes Era — namely, that platforms win by proving they drive performance (in the form of ROAS or, better yet, incremental sales).
That’s why performance TV is gaining steam while Google, Meta, and Amazon bet on PMax, Advantage+, and Performance Plus. In an era defined by efficiency and quantitative scrutiny, outcomes are the only story that sells.
If the open web wants to reassert its relevance, it has to play by those rules.
The challenge is that growing open web traffic isn’t on the table. The structural shift away from the open web — toward apps, closed platforms, and AI-native interfaces — is well underway. You’re not going to reverse that trend through better storytelling or smarter sales.
What is in play is how much value you can extract from the traffic that remains.
This is where the open web still has room to move — not by expanding reach, but by increasing yield. That means maximizing the value of every open web audience interaction (or, yes, driving better performance and marketing outcomes).
AI can play a critical role here, lending credibility to the performance web thesis, in the form of:
Creative that responds dynamically to context and intent
Segmentation built on real performance signals rather than static demographics
Smarter pacing and budget allocation based on live campaign data
Faster identification and removal of waste
The task isn’t to make the funnel bigger. It’s to make it sharper.
That’s the essence of the “performance web” thesis — and AI may provide just enough credibility to make it viable. Whatever the viability of Taboola’s study in regard to Taboola’s own business, it is a preview of the next wave of open web adtech positioning.
We’re going to see more companies claiming they can turn open web media into a precision engine for outcomes. And we’re going to hear a lot more about performance — not just in CTV, but in display, native, and OLV.
The performance web thesis is coming. The question is who can actually back it up.
