When the major DSPs finished their made-for-advertising delistings late last year, the open web lost an estimated 12–15% of its biddable inventory overnight. Buyers celebrated. Then their Q1 invoices arrived: open-exchange display CPMs up 18% year over year, with no corresponding lift in performance.
Supply didn't shrink. It relabeled.
Tracking a basket of 200 delisted domains, we found 64% of their traffic re-emerged within 90 days — on new domains, inside curated deals, or repackaged through resellers with fresh sellers.json entries. The MFA economy is a traffic-acquisition business, and traffic acquisition doesn't care what domain it lands on.
What smart buyers are doing
The buyers getting Q1-2025 prices in 2026 stopped filtering by domain lists and started underwriting traffic sources: session depth, attention metrics, and — where sellers allow it — acquisition channel disclosure. Inventory bought this way benchmarked 22% cheaper per attentive second than "premium" curated packages in our sample.
The lesson generalizes: in every cycle, the label gets policed and the underlying economics route around it. Buy the economics, not the label.