The Sell Sider

With no-click generative AI search gaining steam, here’s how publishers can thrive when search traffic disappears.

The past two decades have left publishers struggling to effectively compete with “easy buttons” from tech giants and UGC behemoths. The ad tech industry must proactively support publishers with solutions tailored to their needs.

The wave of ad tech headlines in recent weeks represents a long overdue moment of reckoning for companies who (still) hold disproportionate control over publishers’ website traffic and revenue potential.

The curation debate is missing a critical piece: standardized reporting. Without it, curation risks leaving publishers in the dark about its actual value.

Curation is amazing – for SSPs. The question publishers continually ask is, “Is curation good for us?” That’s the wrong question. 

The first half of this decade has left publishers reeling from a pandemic jab and an AI uppercut that rearranged our reality and knocked us to our knees. Here’s how pubs and their ad tech partners can punch back in the years ahead.

Solutions that fundamentally address the issues curation attempts to solve already exist. The problem is that none of these solutions have been adopted by the buy side.

A Google breakup could lead to a more fragmented market, with multiple smaller entities competing for ad space. This will almost certainly result in increased competition and higher ad rates for publishers.

The programmatic open marketplace is designed to sustain the business models of ad tech, agencies and consultancies, rather than serving the interests of advertisers, audiences and media owners. It cannot be fixed. It must be rebuilt.

Competing agendas are limiting the tools publishers have at their disposal in ways that aren’t always primarily motivated by user privacy. Here are five things about privacy in digital media that should keep publishers up at night.