By Peter WIlmot, Chief Product Officer at Shopsense
For years, retail media meant one thing: sponsored product listings on retailer websites. This on-site model was simple: as shoppers decided what to buy, brands paid to be seen at the top of search results on sites like Amazon.
But a new model is emerging. According to eMarketer, off-site spending in 2026 is slated to grow at twice the rate of on-site. In other words, the industry that grew up inside the walled gardens is now breaking free.
This shift points to the limits of on-site and opportunities presented by off-site, certainly, but also has implications that go far beyond where ads appear.
The limits of on-site
On-site retail media has always had a ceiling problem.
For starters, there are only so many shoppers who visit a retailer’s website. Plus, there are only so many search results to sponsor and a limited number of product detail pages to place ads against.
As more brands have competed for this same inventory, prices have skyrocketed.
It’s simple math: if a retailer has 100 million monthly visitors and 50 brands want to reach them, competition is manageable. But when 500 brands want in, spots get expensive. Up that to 50,000, and the economics just break.
This is where most major retail media networks find themselves today: early adopters captured most of the value, while latecomers continue to pay premium prices for diminishing returns.
The off-site opportunity
Off-site changes this equation entirely. Instead of competing for limited inventory on retailer properties, brands can reach shoppers across the open internet, connected TV, social platforms, and publisher sites. In addition to larger audiences, this creates a nearly unlimited supply opportunity.
Many of retail’s heavy hitters have already expanded their media offerings to include off-site capabilities, using first-party purchase or tailored contextual data to target shoppers wherever those shoppers spend time online.
Albertsons Media Collective, for example, is rolling out shoppable integrations on YouTube, Instacart launched shoppable formats on Roku, and Walmart partnered with NBCUniversal to run shoppable linear TV ads with QR codes. The transactions that come as a result of these moves will, of course, still happen on the retailer’s platform. But discovery, consideration, and the brand impression itself can now happen anywhere.
Why publishers are opting in
Retail media has been largely inaccessible for most content companies, given that budgets have mostly flowed directly to retailer properties.
But when brands want to reach shoppers outside of retailer environments, they need places to reach them. Publisher sites, streaming platforms, and content destinations become valuable inventory.
The publishers already investing in commerce integrations are well-positioned to capture this spend, as shoppable content is now the infrastructure that makes off-site retail media work.
This is particularly relevant as traditional publisher revenue streams face pressure. With search traffic in decline and programmatic display rates stagnating, commerce media offers a new revenue category that didn’t exist at scale five years ago.
The ecosystem model
Industry analysts have begun to describe this shift as one from “networks” to “ecosystems.”
The network model was vertical: brands advertised on retailer sites, which themselves controlled inventory.
Retail media ecosystems are horizontal. In them, data powers advertising across multiple platforms and publishers, making the retailer an identity and measurement layer rather than just a media destination.
This shift requires new infrastructure, such as data clean rooms for privacy-compliant audience matching, standardized measurement for cross-platform attribution, and commerce protocols that let transactions happen without forcing shoppers through hoops. Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UPC) is one such attempt, whose goal is to make commerce work seamlessly across platforms and surfaces.
Whether UCP becomes the standard or competitors emerge, the direction is clear: commerce now sits on top of content rather than a separate destination.
The future of retail media
The recent growth of off-site retail media reflects structural changes in how commerce media works.
On-site will continue to capitalize on the moments that shoppers spend on retailers’ sites, where impressions can command premium prices.
But the growth, incremental budgets, and new advertiser adoption—in short, the future of retail media—lies off-site. That’s because the ecosystem model finally works: the data is good enough, measurement is getting better, and the infrastructure is beginning to come together.
For retailers, this means retail media revenue is no longer limited by website traffic. For brands, it means reaching shoppers in new contexts with the same purchase data that made on-site so effective. And for publishers and platforms, it means a new category of advertiser spend on the lookout for quality inventory.
Commerce media spent its first decade inside walled gardens. The next decade will be defined by what happens now that it’s free.
