By Ian Maier, AdTech and AI Lead at Hightouch
Call 2026 advertising’s Boston Tea Party. Brands are done paying “ad taxes” just to reach the customers already in their database. The first crates going overboard are the CPM markups on first-party audiences. And once they go, they won’t be coming back.
The reason isn’t mysterious. Publishers are finally running the core workflows themselves. They’re building their own identity graphs, standing up their own integration pipes, and building direct relationships with brands and agencies. That’s eliminating the need for data onboarders who sit between brands, publishers, and platforms and tax every side of the exchange.
To be fair, onboarders emerged to solve real problems. A decade ago, publishers were dependent on third-party cookies and lacked the infrastructure to ingest a brand’s data, despite the need to turn offline customer lists into digital audiences for targeting and suppression. Onboarders emerged to provide the glue. They built basic data pipelines, combined offline data with cookie pools, and orchestrated delivery to publishers, DMPs, and ad platforms. It was necessary and valuable. But today, those problems are largely gone.
What changed? Three big shifts converged.
First, sellers are building and owning identity graphs. That means they can match a brand’s hashed emails to their own logged-in users, map IP addresses to households, and confidently resolve device IDs. When the seller can do that matching natively, you don’t need a gatekeeper in the middle taking a cut for passing the file along.
Second, integrations with DSPs, SSPs, CTVs, and publishers are standardizing. APIs and warehouse-native clean rooms are replacing custom integrations owned by one or two vendors. Instead of waiting weeks to activate a new audience, brands can hit an API and activate an audience in minutes. Or set up a warehouse-native clean room job where customer records can be matched against exposures to measure performance without exposing PII.
Third, the workflow is being centralized around the data and the tools marketers actually use. Data warehouses are becoming the source of truth for marketing data. User-friendly marketing platforms are becoming the preferred method of onboarding that data. More publishers are partnering with data warehouses and marketing platforms directly so that brands can push audiences without extra hops or hidden taxes. When the pipes are direct, and the seller can match on their end, the role of the legacy onboarding vendor shrinks.
This has real consequences for fees.
Historically, onboarding vendors taxed both sides of the exchange, charging the media buyer and the seller (and SSP and DSP) for the privilege of translating data from brand A to publisher B. That made sense when they were the only ones who could do it. But today, seller-run identity graphs and direct integrations make those tolls impossible to justify.
Going forward, only one party will be charged for onboarding, and only once – typically the media buyer, and only when third-party data is used to improve match rates. If you want to enrich your list with third-party identity data to match more people and households, that’s a value-add that the brands may choose to pay for. But the days of paying a CPM markup just to target your own customers are ending.
For publishers, this is upside. Owning identity and workflow means more control, higher margins, faster activation, and cleaner compliance. You can offer advertisers a clear path: drop a file, call an API, or join a data clean room. No inflated CPMs that make your media more expensive. You’re selling media and outcomes, not charging for plumbing. That transparency makes your inventory easier to buy, and it reduces friction in IOs.
For media buyers, this means speed and performance. Instead of passing data through multiple platforms, teams can push audiences straight from their data warehouse or marketing tools and see them active instantly across partners. Budgets move to working media rather than onboarding markups. Measurement gets cleaner because the matching logic lives with the seller and can be validated in a warehouse-native clean room.
For onboarding vendors, it’s a wake-up call. Seller-run identity graphs remove the need for a third party to “own” the matching process. APIs and warehouse-native clean rooms make the pipes generic. The value shifts to specific services, like supplementing first-party data with third-party identifiers to improve match rates. Gatekeeping and rent-seeking go away.
None of this is anti-onboarding. It’s onboarding done right: Brands and publishers connect directly, third-party data is additive and optional, and is priced according to the value it provides. The infrastructure is modernized, the workflows standardized, and the fees normalized.
So yes, 2026 will compress onboarding fees. But more importantly, it will align the economics with the real work that’s being done. Sellers will run their own graphs and integrations. Marketing platforms like CDPs and CRMs will be the default activation method. Open APIs and clean rooms will replace custom integrations owned by one or two gatekeepers. Only one party will pay for onboarding, only once, and only when third-party data is used to improve match rates.
Brands are voting with their feet. CPM fees on first-party data are on their way out. And once they’re gone, they’ll be gone forever.
