In the weeks leading up to the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, there was an uproar on LinkedIn about the agenda. Publishers (and sell side tech vendors, too) were openly frustrated. There was too much future-casting, critics said. Why weren’t there any conversations focusing on the here and now?
How do publishers grow real revenue in 2026? How do they recover signal, defend premium inventory, and adapt to answer engine apocalypse without blowing up their business models? These are the questions publishers are most concerned with now.
That tension was wafting through the air at ALM. And that’s exactly where my conversation with Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, started.
He stepped right up to the challenge, outlining where publishers can reclaim lost value today, where AI will meaningfully change the revenue equation, and why 2026 could mark a real rebalancing of power between buy side and sell side.
Below is an edited Q&A based on that conversation.
AdExchanger: Thinking of this as the IAB Tech Lab Publisher Protocol for 2026, if you had to give publishers a simple protocol for the year ahead, what are the top three things they should consider implementing?
ANTHONY KATSUR: First, publishers should be thinking about how to work with LLMs and how to take advantage of this new answers economy — including enabling answers on their own sites. There’s an opportunity for publishers to beat the LLMs at their own game. We’re already seeing companies do this by embracing the concept of an answers economy on their own properties.
Second is signal loss. Publishers need to stay very focused on maintaining high-fidelity, addressable audiences across environments like Safari and other browsers that continue to constrain signal.
And third, privacy isn’t going away. It may feel like it’s taken a back seat to shiny new things like AI, but regulators haven’t forgotten about it. Publishers can’t afford to either.
From the perspective of a mid-sized publisher, where does Trusted Server make the biggest difference?
Trusted Server directly addresses signal loss. It’s an open-source piece of software that lives at the publisher’s edge — think Fastly, Akamai, or Cloudflare — and moves not just signaling but ad execution off the browser and into the publisher’s environment.
That allows ads to be fully rendered server-side and delivered as a single payload to the browser. The result is a better user experience with faster page loads, improved viewability, and less third-party JavaScript on the page. In our tests, we’ve seen page load times improve by roughly 300%.
It also gives publishers explicit control over their data. They can create a server-side cookie that they alone control and federate it only with partners they choose. And it works with existing ad servers, SSPs, and programmatic partners — for both programmatic and direct-sold deals. It’s a very robust piece of software.
Between Trusted Server, content monetization protocols, and LLM-related initiatives, where do you think publishers will see the biggest immediate impact?
Trusted Server is the heavier lift, but it delivers the biggest immediate impact.
Safari accounts for roughly 20–25% of the browser market share, and there’s effectively no signal there today. On top of that, ad blocking affects 30–40% of inventory, depending on the study. If a publisher can re-establish identity across that 20% of audience — in a privacy-compliant way — and recover 30% of inventory lost to ad blocking, that’s real, near-term revenue upside.
Deploying Trusted Server across your edge takes work, but the potential for revenue recovery is tangible.
There’s also a lot of conversation right now about agentic workflows. What will actually help publishers the most?
I want to be very transparent here. The verdict is still out. Agentic workflows have only been on the industry’s radar for about six months, and we’re all figuring this out in real time.
The low-hanging fruit is discovery and curation — helping buyers and sellers more easily discover content, audiences, and opportunities, and execute those through guaranteed buys or PMPs. Agentic workflows can streamline ad operations and parts of revenue operations, but salespeople are still absolutely critical. Relationships and nuance still matter.
Where agents shine is processing massive amounts of data quickly — doing in seconds what would take humans days. That’s where the efficiency gains start to show up.
How far out are we from when buying and selling agents actually make deals on their own?
We’re seeing very early tests now, and those will accelerate through 2026. But nothing truly scales until 2027 or 2028.
There’s healthy skepticism — especially from publishers — about what agentic workflows really solve and whether they introduce new tech fees that eat into premium inventory margins. That ROI question is real, and CFOs will be running those numbers over the next couple of years.
The buy-side value proposition is clearer right now, especially for media planning and discovery. But where Tech Lab plays a role is making sure buyer agents and seller agents speak a common language. You don’t want hallucinations where an impression goal turns into a budget — that’s a very bad phone call.
The good news is we already have the standards foundation. We’re not starting from scratch; we’re layering agentic protocols on top of existing ones.
If we’re sitting here a year from now, what would make you say 2026 really worked for publishers?
I think the big shift will be sell-side decisioning.
For over a decade, most of the decisioning power sat on the buy side. What we’re starting to see is a rebalancing—not a collapse of the supply chain —but smarter sell-side partners using AI to curate audiences, content, and supply closer to the user and the content itself.
Publishers have a direct relationship with users. With better tools, they can create smarter packages — even what I’d call media derivatives — combining audiences and inventory across publishers into performance-driven deals.
That allows publishers to command higher premiums, reduce inefficiencies like excess QPS, and deliver greener, more cost-effective transactions. It changes the premium conversation entirely.
And that’s ultimately good for publishers.
Absolutely. It’s paid-for-performance, more efficient, and gives publishers the leverage they haven’t had in a long time.
