By Tomas Forsbäck, CEO and Founder, Readpeak
On social platforms, advertising is designed to stop the scroll. On the open web, it is still designed to fill space. While TikTok and Instagram have designed ads around attention (how long someone watches, interacts, or stays engaged), the open web continues to trade in impressions that sit outside the user’s true focus. Ads are present, but rarely experienced. Meanwhile, user behavior has moved on. People now consume information in continuous, attention-led flows shaped by feeds, not pages. An open web that still sells space instead of experience is asking advertisers to buy against habits that no longer exist.
The solution is to design ads that live inside how people consume content, not around it.
The Social Blueprint: Engineering the Scroll
Closed platforms like TikTok and Instagram have successfully collapsed the distance between content and commercial messaging. Ads appear as native elements of the user’s behavioral flow, not an external interruption.
On TikTok, the TopView ad format uses a 3-second full-screen takeover that commands focused engagement the moment the app opens, securing a technical hook before the user even begins their session.
Instagram achieves immersion by embedding commerce directly into the physical habits of the app, such as swiping through Stories or interacting with product tags in a feed. These actions are behavioral triggers that turn browsing into active participation, allowing Instagram to maintain an average attention benchmark of 1.9 seconds per impression.
These platforms (just to name two among many) prioritize content relevance and the ability to stop a scroll over simple reach or follower counts. Because they own the entire interface, they can guarantee a level of exclusive visual focus that is structurally difficult for most websites to offer.
The open web often fragments this focus by burying messages in crowded sidebars where they compete with navigation and unrelated links. This leads to a significant attention gap where research indicates that only 20% of technically viewable desktop display ads are actually noticed by human eyes.
Recalibrating Ad Design for Active Participation
Open web formats typically follow a design language built for static pages and clicks, even though reading now happens through scrolling, tapping, and pausing on mobile screens. Competing with feed-based experiences means building ads that move with the content itself, using the same visual and functional cues as the surrounding reporting.
For example, let’s say a consumer electronics brand is promoting the durability of its products. The brand could embed a product-comparison slider inside a long-form review, allowing readers to explore battery life or performance trade-offs without leaving the article. Or, a travel brand can integrate a destination-matching tool within a feature on overtourism, letting readers explore alternatives based on seasonality or crowd density. This is also true in the B2B space. For instance, a logistics company could place a short, interactive network map inside an analysis of supply chain volatility, giving readers a hands-on way to explore regional constraints as they read.
When native executions are designed around engagement rather than interruption, they perform more like the surrounding content and less like standalone placements. When advertising behaves like a useful extension of the content rather than a visual interruption, it earns attention naturally.
How to Monetize Intentional Focus
To move away from the pursuit of undifferentiated traffic, publishers and advertisers must transition to a model where attention serves as the bridge to measurable outcomes. This approach ensures that every interaction moves the audience along the customer journey, from awareness to consideration to conversion, where each specific outcome serves to advance the user from one point in that journey to the next.
Deploy Habit-Consistent Ad Formats First
Ad experiences should be designed to behave like content, not like interruptions. Native storytelling, interactive tools, and editorial-style executions create environments where attention can be sustained and converted into engagement. By providing a meaningful content experience, these units move the audience from awareness toward engagement and consideration.
Operationalize Active Attention Metrics
Move beyond binary viewability standards that credit impressions that are technically on screen but never registered. Integrate signals such as scroll velocity, dwell-time intensity, and touch-event frequency to quantify active seconds. These measures give advertisers a clearer picture of human engagement and allow performance to be evaluated on participation, moving the audience through the journey rather than just page delivery.
Prioritize Proprietary Content and Intellectual Scarcity
Create information that AI cannot easily reproduce, such as exclusive B2B datasets, investigative reporting, or expert analysis of volatile markets. When content itself becomes the destination, audiences engage in a more concentrated state. Advertising within those environments benefits directly from that focus, creating outcomes that drive the audience toward the next stage of the customer journey.
Build Direct Utility-Based Gateways
Develop logged-in ecosystems that exchange real value for identity, including personalized dashboards, tools, or specialized newsletters. These direct relationships create consented, high-signal data layers that support targeting based on demonstrated intent, facilitating actionable outcomes like demos or conversions.
Decouple Campaign Success From the Immediate Click
Recalibrate performance expectations toward brand lift and mental availability. Attention-led formats consistently outperform standard banners when it comes to recall and message retention. Shifting strategy toward high-fidelity interactions keeps brands present in memory, effectively moving the audience through awareness to consideration before the purchase cycle begins.
From Commodity to Attention Outcomes
The future of the open web depends on the ability to prove that an audience is paying attention, not scrolling through content mechanically. However, attention is not the final outcome; it is the engine that moves a customer from awareness to engagement and engagement to conversion. The open web creates value when advertising is designed to earn attention and that engagement is used to lead the audience through a meaningful journey. Ad products and pricing models built on that foundation treat attention as scarce, experience as valuable, and context as economically meaningful.
