❓ Problem

Three companies now own the ad world. Meta, Google and Amazon are on track for 62.3% of global digital ad spend in 2026, and that share keeps creeping up. For everyone buying ads, that means rising CACs, the same auction everyone else is bidding into, and a feed so crowded that performance keeps sliding. Brands know they are over-indexed on two or three platforms and badly want somewhere else to go.

Here is the awkward part: the alternatives already exist, in enormous supply. Influencer marketing alone hit roughly $32.55 billion globally in 2025, the IAB pegs creator spending at $37.1 billion in 2025, growing 26% a year, about four times faster than the broader ad market, and micro and nano-influencers are forecast to take 45.5% of all influencer spend. Beyond people, there is a galaxy of physical and niche-digital attention nobody monetises properly: gym mirrors, coffee-shop counters, EV-charger screens, packaging inserts, Discord pins, popular Notion templates, even a banner towed behind an aeroplane.

The attention is cheap and abundant. The buying experience is the bottleneck. Want 50 micro-influencers? Enjoy 50 separate DMs, rate haggling, manual invoicing and zero idea whether it worked. Want an aerial banner over the beach or a tray-table ad? You are cold-calling a guy with a Cessna and a fax machine. 48% of marketers still cite finding the right creators as their single biggest challenge. The long tail of attention is vast, and it is effectively unbuyable. Here's the idea.

✅ Solution

Adlas is a self-serve marketplace that turns the entire long tail of attention into bookable, measurable ad inventory, all purchasable in one campaign.

• One catalogue, four inventory types. Human (micro and nano-influencers, niche newsletter writers, streamers), physical (counters, packaging, gym mirrors, ATM and EV-charger screens), spectacle (aerial and sky banners, projection ads, tray tables, boarding passes) and niche-digital (Discord pins, Notion templates, podcast reads).
• Buy it like a Meta campaign. Filter the catalogue by audience, location, category and budget, upload your creative, and launch across dozens of placements at once instead of running 50 email threads.
• Everything is measurable. Every slot ships with a unique QR code or short link baked in, so even the aeroplane banner reports scans, clicks and conversions. The thing that always made non-traditional inventory unbuyable, no tracking, is solved by default.
• AI does the matching and the creative. It pairs brands with the right tiny creators and surfaces, drafts copy and creative per placement, and flags the inventory most likely to convert.

The wedge is deliberately narrow: own micro-influencer buying first, because supply is the hard part of any marketplace and theirs is sitting right there, underpriced and frustrated. The platform underneath, listing plus matching plus tracking plus payments, then expands "elsewhere" into the physical and airborne stuff, which doubles as the press-worthy proof that Adlas will sell literally any attention surface on earth.

📊 Key Numbers

Market size

• The global advertising market is set to cross $1 trillion for the first time in 2026, and the triopoly already captures 62.3% of global digital spend, leaving a vast, fragmented "everything else" pool that no single platform aggregates.
• Influencer marketing is roughly $32.55 billion globally (2025) and the IAB's wider creator-economy figure is $37.1 billion, growing 26% YoY. This is the beachhead SAM.
• Micro and nano-influencers are forecast to take 45.5% of influencer spend, so the specific wedge, the long tail of small creators, is a roughly $15 billion slice on its own and growing fastest.
• Layer in out-of-home, packaging, in-venue screens and niche-digital surfaces and the addressable "non-duopoly" inventory runs to tens of billions more.

ARR potential

• At a 15-20% take rate, intermediating just $200m of long-tail ad spend a year is a $30-40m revenue business. You do not need to win the market, just a sliver of the tail.
• Bottom-up: 20,000 brands spending an average $500/mo through the platform is $120m of GMV a year; at an 18% take that is roughly $21m, plus supply-side SaaS on top.