The Transparency Gap: What’s Breaking Programmatic Yield

In this episode of Web Without Walls, Michael Irenski, SVP Programmatic Strategy at Hearst, unpacks why the open web’s impact is still widely misunderstood, especially at the publisher level.

Drawing on experience across Hearst, Amazon Publisher Services, and Ziff Davis, he explains how publishers operate in two worlds, how DSP behavior, selective buying, and the move to a cookie-less world are shaping competition and CPMs, and why Hearst unified its newspapers and television into a single programmatic strategy.

The conversation also covers how brand‑safety tools misclassify news content, suppress bid density, and quietly erode yield, plus why publishers need clearer visibility into where and how they are losing revenue in programmatic auctions.

Michael Irenski is SVP, Programmatic Strategy at Hearst, where he leads publisher-first approaches to monetization across digital and omnichannel inventory.

He brings deep experience across the programmatic ecosystem, having worked closely with publishers, platforms, and revenue teams to evolve how supply is packaged, transacted, and optimized at scale. At Hearst, he focuses on strengthening programmatic as a core product capability rather than a standalone channel.

His work is centered on improving yield, transparency, and operational control, helping large publishers adapt to a faster, more data-driven advertising environment.

Vijay Kumar is the Founder and CEO of Mile, where he has spent over a decade helping publishers navigate modern Ad Tech. His work spans pricing strategy, yield optimization, and infrastructure decisions, always focused on giving publishers more clarity and control.

As host of Web Without Walls, Vijay brings real-world experience and thoughtful curiosity to every conversation. He asks the questions publishers care about, challenges assumptions when needed, and creates space for honest, practical industry dialogue.

• "I feel the media industry, the open web itself is being attacked and it's kind of like shrinking at this point right across all fronts."
• "There was a whole industry full of solutions that was built specifically for the cookieless web, right? And when it never came... did the industry actually lose momentum? Because there was no pressure? Yes, obviously, because people don't want to do something for half of that.”