France’s 2025 Programmatic Barometer: Watch GreyFox Ads at Alliance Digitale ▶️

By Max Legrand · GreyFox Ads · French Open Web

What is happening to France’s Open Web—and how can publishers win back advertisers’ attention? GreyFox Ads helped prepare the slides for Alliance Digitale’s 2025 Programmatic Barometer, and joined Arthur Millet to discuss the trends reshaping our industry. 🇫🇷

1. Watch the replay: Alliance Digitale’s 2025 Open Web Programmatic Barometer

This year, Alliance Digitale asked us to prepare the presentation slides for its 2025 Programmatic Barometer. Alongside Arthur Millet, we reviewed the French market and explored ways to help the Open Web compete more effectively with major platforms.

Watch the replay directly on YouTube if the embedded player is unavailable.

2. What do the 2025 figures say about the French Open Web?

According to the SRI figures cited in our original analysis, eight platforms, mainly American, accounted for 76% of the French digital advertising market in 2025. This concentration raises a fundamental question for local publishers: how can a substantial audience translate into a healthier share of advertising investment?

Our analysis also cited a Similarweb estimate of more than 11 billion monthly page views across France’s top 500 websites. That is an enormous pool of potential advertising opportunities (page views are not the same as unique people, ad impressions or guaranteed addressable reach).

We also raised a warning: if the trend observed over the preceding five years continued unchanged, the French Open Web could shrink dramatically over a ten-year horizon. This is a conditional extrapolation, not a forecast with a guaranteed outcome.

3. The format gap: why banners struggle against integrated experiences

On the Open Web, display banners still play a prominent role. Meanwhile, major platforms often offer full-screen or highly integrated advertising experiences that occupy more of the user’s screen.

That does not mean larger formats automatically work better. It means publishers and buyers should pay attention to the actual on-screen presence of an ad, user experience and measurable outcomes—not only whether it crossed a conventional viewability threshold.

We've explored this in our articles on full-screen formats and the Open Web, the attention problem and the limitations of viewability-only optimization.

4. First-party audiences: a programmatic activation challenge

French publishers have valuable first-party relationships with their audiences. But using those signals seamlessly across the programmatic supply chain remains complicated, especially in open-auction buying.

In our original presentation, we highlighted the difficulty of activating publisher first-party data in the Open Auction, a channel described as representing 80% of programmatic investment in the referenced market scope (that percentage should be read in the context of the original barometer).

Better interoperability, clear permissions and suitable activation mechanisms could help. But first-party data is not automatically available for every buyer or every purpose; privacy requirements, contracts and technical compatibility still matter.

For more on this challenge, see making first-party data flow more smoothly and the role of 1.5-party data.

5. How could the French Open Web become more competitive?

Our view is that publishers, agencies and AdTech partners need to make the Open Web’s offer more attractive—not merely produce more bid requests. That means improving the formats available to advertisers, making valuable audience signals easier to activate responsibly, and reducing unnecessary complexity in the buying process.

We developed these ideas further in our long-form Open Garden opinion piece on what broke the Open Web and how to repair it (published in French). You can also read our English introduction to the proposals.

6. What GreyFox Ads is doing for quality programmatic advertising

Here in France, GreyFox Ads focuses on making Open Web display and video advertising more effective, simpler to activate and more transparent. Our Master Curated Deal combines several complementary controls:

• 📡 Supply Path Optimization (SPO): prioritize publisher-operated SSP seats and supply paths that add real value.
• 🚫 Ad-clutter filtering: exclude low-quality websites and subdomains overloaded with advertising—the “Christmas tree” effect. 🎄
• 📐 Screen-share optimization: favor formats that occupy a meaningful portion of the screen.
• 🎯 Audience addressability: use suitable cookie-based, cookieless and no-consent approaches where technically and legally permitted.
• 👌 Simple activation: package supply into curated deals for Media Traders.
• 🪟 Fee transparency: make costs and supply paths easier to understand.

We believe a quality Open Web can offer genuine value to advertisers. The opportunity is there; the industry has work to do to capture it. 💪