Cyber Week Sale:

Save 50% on a 3-month Digiday+ membership. Ends Dec 5.

SUBSCRIBE

WTF is cheap reach?

This article is a WTF explainer, in which we break down media and marketing’s most confusing terms. More from the series →

“Cheap” and “reach” are typically favored terms among advertisers. But taken together, they spell the next potential target for the digital ad industry to weed out.

“Cheap reach” refers to a subset of digital ad inventory that may be often overlooked — literally — and may be a necessary new taxonomy to prevent legitimate publishers from getting caught up in the crackdown on made-for-advertising sites. In the video below, Digiday media editor Kayleigh Barber helps to break down what cheap reach is, why this inventory category was created and why advertisers are not yet scrambling to excise it from their ad buys.

More in Media Buying

Overheard in the Media Agency Report: How Assembly, IPG, Horizon and others use AI and will spend on ads in 2026

In this is behind-the-scenes look at Digiday’s 2025 Media Agency Report, ad execs discuss how the GDP and international sports could impact 2026 spend and how agencies and their clients are actually applying AI tools.

Instacart tripled its smart cart store count this year

Instacart’s smart carts are in triple the number of stores this year than they were in 2024, the company told Modern Retail.

Intended or not, the new Omnicom will forever change agencies as we’ve known them

The world’s largest agency holding company is born. But there may come a day soon where it can no longer be called an agency, but rather a broker and re-seller.