Open Web vs. Walled Gardens: Where HCPs Actually Spend Their Time
Ask most pharma marketers where physicians live online, and the walled gardens come up first. Doximity. Medscape. Sermo. These platforms built businesses around the idea that HCPs need a private, professional space, and that space has real value. And there is no doubt, there is real value inside walled gardens. But a lot of media plans treat these gardens as the primary destination for HCPs online, when the data tells a different story.
Most physicians and other healthcare professionals don’t spend much of their working day inside a walled garden. They log in occasionally to check a message, read a clinical update, or browse a CME course, then log out. The rest of their online research and reading happens somewhere else entirely: across thousands of open, independent health and medical sites they visit as part of normal clinical work. And guess what? Many of the sites they visit are not clinical at all like parade.com, weather.com and others.
In terms of clinical thinking, just think about where an HCP actually goes when they have a question about a drug interaction, want a patient-friendly explanation to hand off, or are keeping up with a therapeutic area. That’s Drugs.com for dosing and interaction checks. Sharecare.com for consumer-facing content they might reference with a patient. The American Diabetes Association’s journal pages for the latest research. Healio.com for specialty news. News-Medical.net for broader medical and science coverage. None of these are walled gardens. They’re open, public, indexed by search engines, and visited constantly by HCPs going about their day.
This is the part of the internet where reach actually lives. A handful of walled gardens might reach a meaningful slice of HCPs some of the time. Thousands of open web publishers, taken together, reach nearly all of them, all the time, in the actual moments when they’re looking for clinical information.
The harder question is how to advertise well in that environment, and this is where format matters as much as reach.
Banner ads on walled gardens work the way banner ads have always worked. They sit next to the content, competing for attention, easy to scroll past, and disconnected from what the HCP is actually reading. They can still deliver impressions and clicks, but they ask the reader to shift attention away from the article to notice the ad at all.
Native advertising across the open web takes a different approach. Instead of sitting next to the content, the ad is built to look and read like part of it. It matches the publisher’s design, uses a similar tone, and appears inline, right where the HCP is already engaged and reading closely. There’s no jarring shift in attention. The ad meets the reader inside the same experience that brought them to the page in the first place, whether that’s a drug interaction lookup, a condition overview, or a piece of clinical news.
That difference shows up in performance. Native placements inside content typically see stronger engagement than banner units because they aren’t competing with the content, they’re part of the reading flow. And because open web publishers span so many specialties, conditions, and use cases, native campaigns can be placed with real contextual relevance. An ad about a diabetes treatment can run inside diabetes-specific content, on a page an HCP is already reading because it’s directly relevant to their work.
Another critical consideration is the price of genuine engagement. Most walled gardens charge by the impression, not by the click, but an impression does not prove anyone actually saw, read or registered the ad. “Viewability” only measures whether an ad appeared on a screen long enough to create an opportunity to be seen. No existing technology can confirm that someone’s eyes focused on it or that the message registered. A click may not be perfect proof of attention either, but it demonstrates deliberate action and places the user much further down the engagement funnel. CPM pricing charges for exposure; CPC pricing charges only when someone acts.
Walled gardens have a role in a broader media strategy. But limiting HCP outreach to a handful of platforms means missing the majority of an HCP’s actual reading behavior. The open web is where the volume is, and native, in-content advertising is the format built to work with how HCPs actually consume information there, not against it.
