Saturday, September 5th, 2026
From February 2027, Ad Manager and AdSense stop counting a display impression when the creative begins downloading and start counting it when the creative begins rendering. Publishers will see their impression totals fall. Nobody will see fewer advertisements.
Every company has dashboards nobody opens, and every company responds by redesigning them. The reason they go unread is that no choice is waiting on what they say.
The search for a single currency of audience measurement has been abandoned in practice if not in rhetoric. What replaced it is messier, more honest and better suited to how media is actually consumed.
Deployment has run well ahead of measurement. A striking number of production systems have no defensible answer to whether they are performing better than what they replaced.
Organizations keep buying infrastructure to answer questions they have never agreed on the wording of. The disagreement is not technical, which is why the technical spending does not resolve it.