▸ Week 43

• - US and UK Publishers Push for Laws Against Stealth AI Bots
• - CNN International Plans to Launch Agentic Ad Sales in 2027
• - Prebid Explores Standards for Tracking AI Use of Publisher Content
• - Study Uncovers Over 2,100 AI-Generated MFA-Style Websites
• - Forbes Joins Google AI Pilot to Explore Value Beyond Clicks
• - Apple Clarifies Safari Restrictions on Cross-Site Tracking
• - Prebid Proposes New Auction Model to Reduce Google's Control
  
  

Media Briefing: The transatlantic push to rein in stealth bots is gathering pace.

US and UK publishers are pushing for stronger legislation against AI crawlers that conceal their identities. In the US, the News/Media Alliance is backing the proposed Stealth Bot Prohibition Act, while publishers on both sides of the Atlantic are calling for greater transparency around automated content access. As scraping grows, publishers say disguised bots are becoming harder to block. Some, including People Inc., have adopted default blocking policies. The debate also raises questions about how publishers can protect their content and receive compensation when AI companies use it.

Why CNN International is building for agentic ad market that barely exists yet.

CNN International plans to begin selling advertising through AI agents in the first quarter of 2027, developing its own infrastructure with third-party partners. Challenges include translating commercial rules into agent workflows, navigating competing industry standards and accurately describing inventory to buyers' AI systems. CNN estimates that agent-led deals could eventually represent between 5% and 50% of its advertising business, although their commercial impact remains uncertain.

Provenance and Reporting: Who Made Your Content, and How Did AI Use It?

Prebid's LLM Taskforce has published guidance on how publishers can establish content provenance and gain visibility into its use by AI systems. It highlights C2PA for verifying content provenance and SPUR's Content Telemetry Standard for reporting how AI systems retrieve, cite and present publisher content. The authors suggest combining these approaches with server logs and reporting requirements in AI licensing agreements. Together, they could improve transparency and provide a clearer basis for attribution and content licensing.

AI Slop Sites Are On The Rise. Is Ad Tech Ready For Its New MFA Challenge?

Researchers at DecryptAds have identified more than 2,100 AI-generated recipe websites featuring fabricated author profiles and pages crowded with programmatic ads. Advertisements from major brands were also found on these sites. Using ads.txt and sellers.json data, researchers identified connections between the sites, SSPs and ad tech intermediaries, although some of these relationships are disputed. The findings highlight the challenges of verifying inventory quality across complex programmatic supply chains as AI-generated content becomes more widespread.

Forbes looks to Google AI pilot for insights as publishers seek value beyond the click.

Forbes is participating in a Google AI pilot exploring how publisher content can be used in AI-powered experiences and how publishers can gain insights into its performance. The initiative comes as publishers seek ways to demonstrate the value of their content beyond referral clicks. For Forbes, which has experienced declining referral traffic, understanding how its journalism contributes to AI-powered discovery could support its broader focus on loyal audiences and diversified revenue.

Apple finally explains its Safari block, and identity companies are in its sights.

Apple has explained its Safari restrictions targeting technologies that use email-derived identifiers for cross-site tracking. Identity providers including LiveRamp, ID5 and The Trade Desk's UID2 are among those affected. Apple has not disclosed the full list of restricted companies or explained how they could be removed. The restrictions have also prompted questions about their impact on the open advertising ecosystem, particularly as Apple continues expanding its own advertising business.

Ad Tech Briefing: Can flipping the ad auction wrest control of ad tech from Google?

Prebid has previewed a proposal that would reverse the traditional auction order, allowing ad servers such as Google Ad Manager to bid into Prebid auctions. If implemented, the model could allow publishers to access AdX demand without relying on Google's ad server to run the final auction. Prebid is aiming to formalise the proposal in early 2027, but Google has not committed to the proposed architecture. The changes could give publishers greater control over auction decisions and reduce their dependence on Google's advertising technology.

▸ Week 42

• - New ‘zero-click’ spyware hacked phones using targeted ads
• - Recent Reports Concerning a TCF Vendor, Discover-Tech
• - Media Briefing: Overheard from publishers at Digiday London Media Strategies Town Hall
• - IPA Bellwether Sees Growth Across All Marketing Categories in Q3
• - Addressability is back as a headline concern for attendees at this year’s Prebid Summit
• - Prebid’s Proposed Auction Overhaul Would Do What The Court Wouldn’t: Separate AdX From GAM
• - Apple’s WebKit Updates Mean Advertising’s Future is Server-Side
• - Norway fines Microsoft's Xandr $9.6 million over Grindr data sharing
  
  

New ‘zero-click’ spyware hacked phones using targeted ads.

Researchers have uncovered a spyware operation that used targeted online ads to infect devices without requiring clicks. The operation, linked to Discover-Tech, compromised at least 45 devices belonging to Al Jazeera staff. The ads appeared across more than 120,000 websites and 70,000 apps. Google has since blocked Discover-Tech, raising concerns about security in programmatic advertising.

Recent Reports Concerning a TCF Vendor, Discover-Tech.

IAB Europe has suspended Discover-Tech from the Transparency & Consent Framework's (TCF) Global Vendor List following an audit that identified violations of TCF policies. The decision follows research linking the company to spyware distribution through online advertising. The suspension will remain in place until compliance is verified, while further confirmation of the reported activities could lead to permanent removal.

Media Briefing: Overheard from publishers at Digiday London Media Strategies Town Hall.

At Digiday's Media Strategies Town Hall in London, publisher executives discussed how AI is changing content discovery, audience measurement and commercial relationships. As AI-powered services reshape how audiences find information, publishers are reconsidering traditional traffic metrics and how they measure the value of their content.

Discussions also covered AI crawler access, content licensing and emerging opportunities to automate advertising sales. These developments raise questions about how publishers can protect their content, maintain audience relationships and develop sustainable revenue models as AI becomes more integrated into digital media.

IPA Bellwether Sees Growth Across All Marketing Categories in Q3.

UK marketing budgets increased across every category in the third quarter of 2026, according to the latest IPA Bellwether Report. The overall net balance of companies increasing their budgets reached +14.3%, the strongest reading since the second quarter of 2024. Main media budgets recorded a net balance of +9.8%, led by online advertising and video. However, business confidence remains negative, and forecasts suggest slower advertising growth in 2027.

Addressability is back as a headline concern for attendees at this year’s Prebid Summit.

Addressability has returned as a major concern for the programmatic advertising industry following Apple's latest iOS 27 restrictions. At Prebid Summit in New York, industry executives discussed how browser and operating system policies are creating new challenges for audience targeting and measurement.

The discussions also covered Google's proposed integration with Prebid and the potential impact of AI on advertising. For publishers, the renewed focus on addressability highlights the importance of maintaining effective monetisation as third-party targeting capabilities become more restricted.

Prebid’s Proposed Auction Overhaul Would Do What The Court Wouldn’t: Separate AdX From GAM.

Prebid has proposed a new auction structure that would allow publisher ad servers to participate directly in Prebid auctions, rather than the other way around. The proposal follows a US court order requiring Google to integrate with Prebid. Under the proposed model, Google's AdX would compete alongside other SSPs, potentially reducing Google's advantage and giving publishers greater control over programmatic auctions. The framework is still under development.

Apple’s WebKit Updates Mean Advertising’s Future is Server-Side.

IAB Tech Lab says Apple's latest WebKit restrictions strengthen the case for moving advertising infrastructure from browsers to publisher-controlled servers. The updates introduce domain-level blocking of certain ad tech vendors, with the potential to disrupt targeting, measurement and publisher monetisation.

According to IAB Tech Lab, server-side processing could improve performance and give publishers greater control over data shared with advertising partners. Its open-source Trusted Server initiative is being developed and tested to support this approach, although broader industry adoption remains a work in progress.

Norway fines Microsoft's Xandr $9.6 million over Grindr data sharing.

Norway's data protection authority has fined Microsoft's ad tech company Xandr NOK 92 million ($9.6 million) for unlawfully processing personal data from dating app Grindr. The decision highlights the responsibility of advertising intermediaries to comply with data protection rules and ensure lawful data sharing across the programmatic advertising supply chain.

▸ Week 41

• - Safari blocklist boosts Trusted Server interest
• - Publishers rethink AI crawler access
• - Publishers revisit registration walls
• - Agentic AI enters CTV ad buying
• - PubX expands agentic advertising
• - WBD study reveals TV measurement gaps
• - Google and DOJ disagree on ad tech remedies
•  

Apple’s Safari ad tech blocklist sends publishers back to IAB Tech Lab’s Trusted Server.

Apple’s latest software update is blocking certain ad tech vendors in Safari, disrupting audience targeting and causing revenue declines for some publishers. The restrictions have increased interest in IAB Tech Lab’s Trusted Server, which moves advertising processes from users’ devices to publisher-controlled servers. Some publishers are already testing the framework as a potential workaround, although challenges remain around measurement, buyer acceptance and implementation costs.

Block or allow was never the whole decision. The business rules are.

Cloudflare has changed its default settings to block AI training and agent crawlers on ad-supported websites while continuing to allow search crawlers. The change highlights growing efforts to give publishers more control over how AI systems access their content. According to Prebid.org, simply allowing or blocking all AI traffic is not enough.

Publishers need policies that distinguish between different crawler activities and reflect their business models. Enforcing these rules through CDN and bot-management tools could help protect content, advertising revenue and legitimate ad tech operations.

Media Briefing: As AI search shifts referrals, publishers revisit registration walls.

As search referrals decline, publishers are reconsidering registration walls to turn anonymous visitors into known audiences. The Verge is preparing to test mandatory registration for selected visitors, aiming to build stronger direct relationships with readers. Registered users can provide valuable first-party data for audience targeting and potentially command higher programmatic ad rates.

However, publishers face a trade-off between increasing revenue per user and losing traffic, while registration and subscription strategies may not fully compensate for declining referrals.

How Does Agentic Buying Work In CTV?

Agency InterMedia is using AI-powered workflows to manage connected TV advertising through integrations between Claude, Vibe and Olyzon. The setup allows campaign managers to analyse performance data, identify optimisation opportunities and make campaign adjustments from a single interface. InterMedia is already using this approach across most of its biddable campaigns.

While the technology can reduce manual work and simplify campaign management, human oversight remains essential. Differences between advertising platforms also create challenges for data integration and standardisation.

PubX Raises $5 Million And Buys Digital Governance Startup Compliant.

PubX has raised $5 million in Series A funding and acquired media governance startup Compliant to expand its AI-powered advertising platform. The investment will support its US expansion and the development of its buyer-side capabilities. PubX is developing AI buyer and seller agents that can transact directly without traditional DSPs or SSPs, using the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP).

New WBD Report Makes The Case For Getting The Measurement Basics Right.

Warner Bros. Discovery has published a study revealing significant inconsistencies in TV and streaming ad measurement. The research compared five providers across more than 50 campaigns. In one campaign, reported impressions ranged from 24.6 million to 43.5 million depending on the provider. The findings highlight the need for common standards in impression and viewability counting, along with greater transparency around audience estimates and platform coverage.

Google And The DOJ Filed Their Proposed Final Judgments In The Ad Tech Case – Here’s What They’re Still Arguing About.

Google and the US Department of Justice have submitted competing proposals for the final terms of remedies in Google's ad tech antitrust case. While both sides largely agree on the core measures, disagreements remain over implementation and enforcement. The remedies would require Google to open AdX to Prebid and competing publisher ad servers, separate DFP and AdX contracts, and give publishers greater access to their data.

Key disputes concern implementation timelines, global coverage and compliance monitoring. The court must resolve these before the measures can take effect.

▸ Week 40

• - SPUR launches new standard to track publisher content in AI.
• - IAB Europe introduces a common framework for CTV measurement.
• - IAB Europe sets new guidance for responsible digital advertising.
• - AI crawlers challenge the publisher value exchange.
• - Publishers push for action on AI scraping.
• - Apple blocks The Trade Desk from serving ads on Safari.
• - AI advances in programmatic, but human control remains key.
• - Publishers prepare for a future with less search traffic.
• - Open web advertising finds new value as major platforms get pricier.
  

   

SPUR publishes AI content tracking standard, pitches OpenAI and Google to join advisory board

SPUR has released a new content telemetry standard designed to track how publishers’ content is used by AI tools. The framework records when content is retrieved, used to ground an AI response, cited, presented or engaged with, giving publishers more consistent data on how their content appears across AI services. This could provide a foundation for more transparent reporting and future licensing agreements.

IAB Europe Launches Connected TV (CTV)  Measurement Framework and Transparency Principles.

IAB Europe has released its final Connected TV Measurement Framework and Transparency Principles, establishing common metrics and definitions for CTV campaigns across Europe. The framework covers delivery, audience and performance measurement, from valid impressions and viewability to reach, conversions and ROAS. Five transparency principles aim to make methodologies, limitations and assumptions clearer, helping compare CTV performance more consistently.

IAB Europe Opens Public Comment on New Responsible Digital Advertising Guidance.

IAB Europe has released the first volume of its new Within Reach guidance, designed to establish more consistent practices around the social impacts of digital advertising and media. The guidance sets baseline expectations across six areas: accessibility, invalid traffic, made-for-advertising inventory, supply chain transparency, ad fraud and scam advertising. Public comment is open until 30 October.

The State of AI Traffic: What Publishers Are Seeing in Crawls, Clicks, and Costs.

AI systems are consuming more publisher content while sending relatively little traffic back. AI referrals account for less than 1% of publisher pageviews, while the scrape-to-referral ratio reached 227:1 in Q2 2026. At the same time, zero-click search is reducing referral traffic further. The traditional exchange where publishers allowed their content to be crawled in return for traffic is increasingly breaking down.

AI crawling can also create direct costs for publishers. Automated requests are more likely to reach uncached content, increasing infrastructure load, while bot traffic can distort analytics and affect viewability, CTR, RPM and invalid traffic measurement. The result is a growing imbalance: publisher content continues to create value for AI services, while traffic and advertising revenue do not necessarily flow back to the publishers producing it.

Condé Nast, Hearst among 300 media execs to push federal ‘bad bots’ bill on AI scraping.

More than 300 publishing executives, including representatives from Condé Nast, Hearst and USA Today Co., are urging U.S. lawmakers to support the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act. The bill would require AI crawlers to identify themselves rather than disguise their traffic or circumvent publishers’ attempts to block scraping. Greater transparency could give publishers more control over their content and support direct AI licensing agreements.

Apple’s Latest Operating System Blocks The Trade Desk From Serving Ads On Safari.

Apple’s latest iOS update is preventing The Trade Desk from serving ads on Safari after WebKit added the DSP’s core ad request and delivery domain to its blocklist. The change goes beyond restricting identity matching and currently blocks The Trade Desk’s access to Safari inventory on affected devices. Apple is investigating the issue, but it remains unclear whether the block is unintended or reflects a broader change in its tracking policies.

Ad Tech Briefing: AI is changing programmatic buying faster than who controls it.

AI is already widely used in programmatic advertising, but fully autonomous buying and selling remain less common. An IAB Europe survey found that 86% of respondents use AI in marketing, with programmatic optimisation and media planning among the most common applications. Agentic buying and selling remains less established, with most organisations still relying on significant human involvement.

The measurable benefits of AI remain uneven. Operational efficiency is the most common way organisations evaluate AI, while improvements in targeting and yield are reported less often. For publishers, increasing automation makes transparency and control more important. As more auction decisions are automated, publishers need to understand their impact and retain control over how their inventory is monetised.

Digiday Publishing Summit September 2026 Recap: How publishers are rebuilding for the post-search era.

Publishers are preparing for a future with less search traffic by shifting their focus from scale and platform-driven traffic towards stronger direct audience relationships. As Google referrals decline and AI changes content discovery, publishers are investing in loyal audiences, registrations, subscriptions and stronger on-site experiences. At the same time, they are diversifying revenue through premium advertising, data, licensing and other new opportunities.

Publishers are taking different approaches to the transition. Reuters is using a dynamic paywall to balance subscription and advertising revenue, while The Verge is treating Google traffic as incremental and focusing on converting high-value readers into registered users, newsletter readers and subscribers. AI is also creating new revenue opportunities through content licensing and AI visibility products, although questions around compensation, attribution and standards remain unresolved. The common direction is towards more direct, diversified and less platform-dependent publisher businesses.

Who Will Stand Up For The Open Web?

As advertising on major platforms becomes more expensive and automated, some buyers are reconsidering open web programmatic as a lower-cost alternative that offers greater control over where and how media is bought. The article argues that open web advertising may also be undervalued by traditional metrics. Focusing on quality inventory, contextual environments and meaningful measurement could give publishers an opportunity to demonstrate its value more effectively.

▸ Week 39

• - Agentic ad buying moves towards scale
• - Publishers question the value of personalisation
• - AAMP 3.0 standardises agentic ad buying
• - Publishers assess Google’s ad tech remedies
• - Relevant Yield introduces automated floor price optimisation
• - Sell-side curation unlocks publisher audiences
• - BCN and PubMatic connect AI agents for publisher data

Agentic Ad Buying Gains Ground: IAB Europe Report Finds Over Half of Industry Expect Operational Scale Within a Year.

An IAB Europe survey finds that 58% of respondents expect agentic ad buying to reach operational scale within the next year, while 86% already use AI in marketing. Despite growing investment, the industry still faces challenges around data security, privacy, governance and demonstrating measurable returns. The findings highlight the gap between expectations for autonomous buying and its current implementation.

Media Briefing: Publishers question whether personalization actually pays off.

Publishers are questioning whether personalised content delivers enough commercial value to justify the resources it requires. Some newsletter experiments have increased engagement, while others have produced similar results to standard editorial selections.

The potential value may extend beyond clicks and open rates. Tailoring content and access for registered readers could help publishers build stronger relationships and encourage paid subscriptions, but the results depend on audience behaviour and the goals of each publisher.

IAB Tech Lab Introduces AAMP 3.0 to Standardize the RFP-to-Buy Process for Agentic Advertising.

IAB Tech Lab has introduced AAMP 3.0 with OpenProposal to standardise the process from an advertising request for proposal to a completed media buy. The framework enables buyer and seller AI agents to exchange structured information about advertising opportunities, proposals and deals, helping publishers make their inventory accessible to agent-driven buying through existing industry standards.

Publishers’ scorecard on Google’s ad tech remedies: they’re progress, but far from a clean win.

Publishers see potential benefits in the remedies imposed on Google’s ad tech business, particularly requirements to open AdX bidding to rival ad servers and improve access to auction data. The changes could give publishers more flexibility in choosing technology partners and help competing platforms optimise their auctions. However, the practical impact will depend on how the requirements are implemented and enforced.

Industry executives also question whether improved interoperability will be enough to change the market while Google retains substantial advertiser demand and its existing ad tech products. Publishers will be watching whether rival platforms gain meaningful access to that demand and whether the changes lead to measurable improvements in competition, control and advertising revenue.

Relevant Digital Introduces Automated Floor Price Optimisation to Relevant Yield.

Relevant Digital has introduced Automated Floor Price Optimisation to Relevant Yield, using publisher-specific machine learning models to dynamically adjust floor prices as auction conditions change. The solution analyses thousands of auction signals across more than 60 metrics and dimensions, while allowing publishers to set minimum floors, choose where optimisation is applied and monitor performance in real time.

Early results show an average revenue uplift of 2–4%, with some publishers achieving higher gains. The feature is included with HB Analytics and HB Manager at no additional cost.

Can Sell-Side Curation Solve The Cookieless Audience Problem For Advertisers?

Permutive and TransUnion are combining publisher first-party data with identity matching to help advertisers reach relevant audiences across inventory that may otherwise lack recognised advertising IDs. The integration enables publishers to package and activate their audience data through sell-side curation.

Permutive reports that one campaign test increased addressable impressions twelvefold and reached five times as many consumers, although these results reflect a specific test rather than a guaranteed outcome for publishers.

BCN bringt mit PubMatic die erste direkte Agent-to-Agent-Implementierung für Publisher-Signale auf den deutschen Markt.

BCN and PubMatic have launched an agent-to-agent workflow that allows advertisers to turn a natural-language audience request into an activatable programmatic deal. BCN’s Signals Agent identifies suitable audience and contextual signals from its publisher network. The offering includes more than 900 audience segments and 600 contextual categories, drawing on over 80 million consented profiles across more than 50 premium domains.

Once the signals are selected, PubMatic’s AI agents can automatically create and activate a targeted private marketplace (PMP) deal. The companies say the workflow reduces a process that previously required manual setup and negotiation to a matter of minutes. The agents communicate through MCP and AdCP, while policy and brand-safety checks remain part of the process. The launch provides a practical example of how agent-to-agent communication can connect publisher data with programmatic demand.

▸ Week 38

• - Google’s ad tech remedies decoded: what changes, what doesn’t and what will take years
• - IAB Europe Advances In-Store and Travel Media Measurement with New Proposals Open for Public Comment
• - FT chief Jon Slade on how business brand became a hit with Gen Z
• - How Reuters’ dynamic paywall is boosting subscriptions and ads
• - IAB Tech Lab’s Programmatic Standard Practices Available for Public Comment
• - Chrome Has A New Way To Measure Ad Overload On The Web
• - Ad Tech Briefing: AI is reinforcing Big Tech’s grip on advertising growth
• - Google rolls out pay-per-value AI licensing program to publishers
  
  

Google’s ad tech remedies decoded: what changes, what doesn’t and what will take years.

Google will face global behavioural rules rather than a breakup, requiring greater data sharing, fairer auction access and restrictions on favouring its own advertising tools. The key change is opening AdX to Prebid and rival ad servers, potentially increasing competition and publisher revenue, with implementation taking up to 15 months.

Critics question the impact because DV360 remains untouched, enforcement could be slow, and Google retains significant control over advertiser demand and data. The remedies also focus on the shrinking open-web display market, leaving growing channels such as streaming TV, in-app advertising and retail media outside their scope.

IAB Europe Advances In-Store and Travel Media Measurement with New Proposals Open for Public Comment.

IAB Europe has opened two proposed measurement frameworks for public feedback, aiming to improve consistency and transparency across in-store Retail Media and Travel Media. The in-store proposals introduce a five-zone framework and base impressions on shoppers’ opportunity to see ads, with transparent modelling where sensors are unavailable and a 28-day sales reporting window.

The Travel Media draft proposes seven-day attribution for sponsored products, 30 days for display and offsite ads, a three-year look-back for new-to-advertiser metrics, and sales reporting based on gross bookings before cancellations. Both frameworks remain drafts, with industry feedback invited by 23 October 2026 before finalisation.

FT chief Jon Slade on how business brand became a hit with Gen Z.

The Financial Times credits its direct reader relationships and subscription model with protecting it from referral traffic declines, with digital now accounting for 80% of revenue. Its Future Audiences Initiative aims to reach 850,000 registered readers under 35 by 2030 through mobile-first videos, free newsletters and educational access, prioritising long-term relationships over immediate subscriptions.

Its AI licensing deals with Google and OpenAI include controls over content use and a “red button” to stop supplying live content, while its own technology blocks large-scale unauthorised scraping. The FT is also developing its Ask FT AI tool, finding that accuracy and suggested questions are essential to encouraging engagement.

How Reuters’ dynamic paywall is boosting subscriptions and ads.

Reuters says its dynamic paywall has helped grow subscriptions while strengthening advertising revenue, using machine learning to weigh each reader’s likely ad value against their propensity to subscribe. The paywall tightens during busy news cycles and loosens during quieter periods, with subscriptions priced at a flat $4 per month across 80 countries.

Subscribers still see ads, and Reuters argues their higher engagement and authenticated first-party data make them valuable to advertisers. Reuters also blocks bots by default unless approved, reporting lower bot traffic without losing monetizable traffic, while continuing to assess whether allowing Google’s crawlers delivers sufficient value.

IAB Tech Lab’s Programmatic Standard Practices Available for Public Comment.

IAB Tech Lab has released Programmatic Standard Practices v1 for public comment, establishing shared business rules and principles for buyers and sellers of digital media. As the Programmatic Governance Council’s first deliverable, it explains how to apply existing standards consistently in programmatic transactions.

The guidance aims to reduce unnecessary transaction costs, improve efficiency and strengthen trust and transparency across the industry. Public comments are open until 16 October 2026, with feedback helping shape the practices and the Council’s ongoing work.

Chrome Has A New Way To Measure Ad Overload On The Web.

Chrome has added four experimental ad metrics to its User Experience Report (CrUX): ad count, ad density, network usage and CPU usage. They use existing data to measure how ads affect users’ screens and device resources, but remain separate from Core Web Vitals and have no Google-defined benchmarks.

Their impact on publishers will likely depend on whether advertisers use them in buying decisions, although no DSP or SSP commitments were confirmed. Google says its advertising platforms will receive no preferential access to the data, while the article highlights the tension between improving publishers’ ad experiences and Google’s AI Overviews diverting their traffic.

Ad Tech Briefing: AI is reinforcing Big Tech’s grip on advertising growth.

Google, Meta and Amazon captured an estimated 56% of US advertising revenue in 2025, up from 53% in 2024, taking a disproportionate share of market growth. AI-directed and automated campaigns now account for roughly 12% of spending and are projected to reach 27% by 2030, giving platforms greater control over budget allocation.

This could reinforce their advantages in data and scale, while requiring advertisers to verify whether automation delivers genuinely incremental results rather than favourable platform-reported metrics. Madison & Wall expects concentration to continue unless major changes in consumer behaviour, new computing platforms or meaningful regulation disrupt the market.

Google rolls out pay-per-value AI licensing program to publishers.

Google is testing an “AI contribution” pilot that pays publishers when it judges their content significantly contributes to answers in Gemini, AI Overviews and AI Mode. Participants can view monthly earnings in Search Console, but Google provides little detail on how payments are calculated, and some publishers describe the payouts as too low to justify joining.

Supporters see an opportunity to establish direct compensation and help shape a future AI licensing market, particularly for smaller publishers with limited negotiating power. Critics argue the scheme could cheaply reduce Google’s legal and reputational risks while weakening publishers’ leverage to demand better terms.

▸ Week 37

• - Ad spend forecasts revised upward as more ad dollars are handled by AI tools.
• - Google avoided (yet another) breakup… now comes the test of the ad tech remedies.
• - Media Briefing: Publishers are rebuilding their newsrooms for the post-Google era.
• - Prebid’s New President Is Its Former Chairman, Garrett McGrath.
• - ‘Frogs in the boiling water’: The Amazon-FTC case and the myth of ad auction transparency.
• - Magnite Launches First Agentic Campaign in EMEA With Amnet France.

Ad spend forecasts revised upward as more ad dollars are handled by AI tools.

U.S. ad spend is forecast to grow 12.3% this year, driven partly by major sporting events and stronger AI-powered advertising tools. Automated campaigns such as Meta Advantage+ and Google Performance Max are expected to capture 12% of U.S. ad spend, up from just 2% in 2023, potentially reaching 27% by 2030.

Agencies report rapid adoption because these tools are convenient and heavily promoted by platforms, with some predicting automation could eventually handle 90% of media spending. However, advertisers should remain cautious because automated campaigns can operate as opaque “black boxes” and still depend heavily on good data, context and human oversight.

Google avoided (yet another) breakup… now comes the test of the ad tech remedies.

A U.S. judge rejected the DOJ’s proposed breakup of Google’s ad tech business, allowing it to retain both its AdX exchange and DFP publisher ad server. Instead, Google will face behavioural restrictions governing how these businesses interact with publishers and competing ad tech providers.

The impact will depend on whether the final rules genuinely improve interoperability, transparency and competitors’ market access or merely preserve Google’s dominance under added oversight. The final terms are due within 30 days, while Google’s planned appeal could extend the uncertainty considerably.

Media Briefing: Publishers are rebuilding their newsrooms for the post-Google era.

Publishers are restructuring teams and creating AI-focused roles as declining Google referrals make traditional SEO-led growth less effective. USA Today is centralising audience and digital production alongside layoffs, while The New York Times and The Washington Post are investing in AI and off-platform discovery.

The broader strategy is shifting from chasing search clicks to building direct audience relationships through apps, newsletters, puzzles, podcasts and video, while using AI to improve efficiency and audience insights. Meanwhile, publishers are pursuing licensing deals, technical protections and copyright lawsuits to gain control and compensation when AI companies use their content.

Prebid’s New President Is Its Former Chairman, Garrett McGrath.

Prebid.org has appointed former chairman and ad tech veteran Garrett McGrath as its new president, succeeding Mike Racic after a 30-day transition. McGrath plans to spend his first 90 days listening to members and industry leaders before deciding how Prebid should evolve for an agentic AI-driven web.

Prebid will remain neutral across competing AI standards and collaborate with organisations committed to publisher demand and open-source access. Its future priorities may include integrating Google’s AdX into Prebid auctions, increasing auction transparency and expanding publisher-led identity, audience and deal-curation initiatives.

‘Frogs in the boiling water’: The Amazon-FTC case and the myth of ad auction transparency.

The FTC alleges that Amazon secretly manipulated its ad auctions by abandoning second-price mechanics and introducing “soft reserve” prices that could raise what winning advertisers paid. Ad buyers are largely unfazed because opaque auction rules have long been standard across Amazon, Google, Meta and programmatic advertising, with auction-type data often unavailable.

As platforms increasingly automate bidding, advertisers have shifted from trying to outsmart auctions toward supplying better conversion signals and creative assets to improve algorithmic performance. Ultimately, most clients care more about reaching audiences and delivering results than whether platforms operate transparent or theoretically “pure” auctions.

Magnite Launches First Agentic Campaign in EMEA With Amnet France.

Magnite and Amnet France launched Magnite’s first agentic advertising campaign in EMEA for a leading automotive brand. Using natural-language prompts, Magnite’s buyer and seller agents identified and activated suitable premium CTV inventory through ClearLine, replacing much of the manual setup process.

The campaign reduced setup time by around 70% and achieved a 95% video view-through rate while uncovering additional inventory and optimisation opportunities. The results suggest that embedding AI agents directly into buying workflows can improve operational efficiency, decision-making and campaign performance.

▸ Week 36

• - Media agencies build audit tools to prevent AI agents from overcharging.
• - The FTC’s Amazon Lawsuit Is Ad Tech’s History Of Opacity Repeating Itself.
• - ChatGPT Ads Hit A $1 Billion Run Rate. Here’s What Advertisers Say Will Get Them To Spend More.
• - Google Won’t Have To Break Up Its Ad Tech Business, Judge Brinkema Rules.
• - Big Screens, News, Reality Shows Lead Programmatic Ad Gains.
• - Neuroscience And AI Are Transforming The Weather Company’s Measurement Stack.

Media agencies build audit tools to prevent AI agents from overcharging.

As AI agents move into real-world media buying, transparency and accountability are becoming increasingly important. Agencies are introducing audit logs and decision tracking to monitor how agents execute campaigns and identify when they move outside predefined parameters. As agentic buying scales, the ability to understand and verify automated decisions could become an increasingly important part of a transparent programmatic ecosystem.

The FTC’s Amazon Lawsuit Is Ad Tech’s History Of Opacity Repeating Itself.

The FTC’s lawsuit against Amazon is raising broader concerns about transparency in digital ad auctions. The regulator alleges Amazon used undisclosed “soft reserve prices” that pushed winning Sponsored Product advertisers closer to their maximum bids, potentially generating around $20 billion in additional revenue since 2019. Amazon denies the allegations.

Industry experts argue the case highlights a wider ad tech problem: advertisers often have limited visibility into how platform auctions actually work and few ways to independently verify their mechanics, strengthening calls for greater transparency, auditability and common auction standards.

ChatGPT Ads Hit A $1 Billion Run Rate. Here’s What Advertisers Say Will Get Them To Spend More.

OpenAI’s advertising business has reached a $1 billion annualised revenue run rate less than six months after launch, but advertisers say further growth will depend on stronger measurement and accountability. ChatGPT Ads still lacks capabilities advertisers expect from mature channels, including robust conversion tracking, audience options, competitor benchmarking and integrations with third-party measurement tools.

Until advertisers can better measure both immediate conversions and longer-term impact, much of the spending is likely to remain in experimental budgets rather than shift into core media allocations.

Google Won’t Have To Break Up Its Ad Tech Business, Judge Brinkema Rules.

Google will not be required to divest AdX or DFP despite being found to have operated an illegal ad tech monopoly, with the court opting for behavioral remedies instead. Potential changes include giving rival ad servers access to real-time AdX bid data, removing Unified Pricing Rules and allowing publishers to set bidder-specific price floors in GAM, while an AdX integration with Prebid has also been discussed.

The final remedies could have significant implications for publisher control, yield optimisation and competition across the programmatic ecosystem.

Big Screens, News, Reality Shows Lead Programmatic Ad Gains.

Programmatic streaming ad spend is increasingly shifting towards large screens, with smart TVs and CTV devices accounting for 79% of premium streaming open programmatic spend in July, up sharply from 57% in June. Amazon Fire TV led all streaming platforms with a 37% share of open programmatic spend, while news and reality TV attracted the largest shares of spending on big screens. The figures highlight the growing importance of CTV environments within programmatic advertising.

Neuroscience And AI Are Transforming The Weather Company’s Measurement Stack.

The Weather Company is combining neuroscience, contextual signals and AI to better understand how weather influences consumers’ emotional states and their response to advertising. The publisher is developing “emotional targeting” to match advertising strategies with different user mindsets, while also using internal AI agents to analyse campaign data, identify insights and support measurement and monetisation decisions.

The approach shows how publishers are experimenting with AI and contextual signals to move beyond traditional reporting and demonstrate greater value to advertisers.

▸ Week 35

• - CTV Infrastructure Moves Toward Standardisation
• - The Trade Desk Expands AI in Kokai
• - Open Web Economics Are Shifting
• - USA Today Optimises Content for AI
• - AI Agents Move into Publisher Operations
• - AI Ad Measurement Raises Governance Questions
• - Prebid Prepares for the Agentic Era
• - Google Expands Preferred Sources for Publishers
  
  

CTV Ad Ops Grows Up: From Promising Capabilities to Repeatable Operations.

As CTV advertising approaches $30 billion in the U.S., IAB Tech Lab says the industry’s operating infrastructure needs to mature alongside its growing scale. New standards and tools aim to improve consistency across CTV ad formats, creative validation, live-event workflows and measurement. The focus is increasingly on making CTV advertising easier to execute reliably across platforms, with more transparent, measurable and repeatable operations.

The Trade Desk’s Zuma Update Adds A Host Of AI-Powered Easy Buttons To Its Kokai Platform.

The Trade Desk has launched Zuma, its biggest update to the Kokai DSP in three years, adding new agentic AI tools, automated audience building and a simplified campaign interface. A new Koa Assistant lets buyers interact with AI agents for tasks including audience creation, frequency optimisation, campaign setup and performance analysis. The update also streamlines measurement, allowing advertisers to launch lift studies directly within Kokai.

Media Briefing: The post-traffic era of the open web is taking shape.

The open web is not disappearing, but its economics are changing as human traffic becomes harder to attract and AI crawlers consume a growing share of publisher content. Publishers are responding by moving away from strategies built primarily around search-driven scale and impression-based advertising, instead investing in stronger brands, direct audience relationships and diversified revenue across newsletters, social platforms, events, sponsorships, licensing and other channels.

AI content licensing could eventually create a new revenue stream, but the market remains fragmented and is not yet developing fast enough to compensate for declining traffic-based ad revenue. The shift is also changing advertising strategies, with publishers increasingly focusing on integrated campaigns, business outcomes and effectiveness rather than impressions alone.

USA Today Co. is reformatting content to attract more AI licensing deals.

USA Today Co. is testing ways to make its content more machine-readable to improve visibility in AI answer engines and attract more AI licensing deals. The publisher is experimenting with content structures, metadata and formats such as markdown, while monitoring which content AI systems access and cite. It also blocks around 99% of self-identified AI bots by default, allowing access mainly through approved relationships.

The Agentic Shift Is Already Happening Inside Publisher Operations.

AI agents are rapidly moving from experimentation into publishers’ day-to-day operations. Burt Intelligence says its MCP offering, launched five months ago, has become its fastest-adopted new product. Publishers are using agents to explore complex datasets, investigate anomalies and automate workflows. Use cases include identifying revenue declines and campaigns at risk, creating reports and assessing available inventory.

One publisher has built an internal agent that allows sales teams to access customer performance insights directly, without involving ad ops in every question. As agents move from accessing data to taking action, governance becomes increasingly important. IAB Tech Lab’s Agent and MCP Registry and AAMP aim to support common standards for how agentic capabilities are discovered and used together. Authentication, permissions and interoperability still need development as agentic workflows become part of everyday publisher operations.

Ad Tech Briefing: AI advertising’s measurement problem is really a governance problem.

As the IAB develops a framework for measuring advertising served to or influenced by AI agents, the challenge is shifting beyond attribution to who controls the data needed for measurement. If AI platforms retain the signals showing how their systems influenced a purchase, independent measurement could depend on data provided by the same companies selling the advertising.

Industry standards could reduce fragmentation, but their value will depend on transparency, data access and interoperability – without shifting measurement power to another generation of dominant technology platforms.

New Chairman Joel Meyer Dishes On Prebid’s Reset For The Agentic Ad Tech Era.

Prebid.org has appointed OpenX CTO Joel Meyer as its new chairman as the organisation adapts to major changes in programmatic advertising. While Prebid’s core mission of helping publishers monetise through open technology remains unchanged, AI-driven traffic declines and agentic advertising are creating new challenges. A key priority will be helping publishers navigate emerging approaches including AdCP, IAB Tech Lab’s AAMP and MCP.

Prebid plans to remain agnostic rather than back a single agentic protocol. Its goal is to ensure publishers can sell their inventory regardless of which protocol buyers use. Meyer says a single industry standard would be more efficient, but expects multiple protocols to coexist. This makes interoperability increasingly important – and gives Prebid a potential role as a neutral, open-source layer connecting publishers with the evolving agentic ecosystem.

One-click link in articles adds publishers to Google users’ ‘preferred source’ for Top Stories and AI search.

Google is making it easier for readers to select publishers as “Preferred Sources” directly from their articles, increasing the likelihood that their content appears prominently in Top Stories and is highlighted in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Publishers can add the new one-click option to their sites as concerns grow over declining search referrals and the impact of AI-generated answers on publisher traffic.

▸ Week 34

• - Agentic Media Buying Expands into Audio
• - Ads for AI Agents Face a Measurement Challenge
• - IAB Tech Lab Clarifies the Scope of AAMP
• - Georgia-Pacific Holds Back on Agentic Buying
• - TV Measurement Market Faces a Competitive Reset
• - Apple to Change App Tracking in Germany

Butler/Till extends agentic media buying tests into audio with iHeartMedia.

Butler/Till and iHeartMedia have tested AI agents for direct buying of streaming audio and podcast inventory, extending agentic media buying beyond display and CTV. The four-week pilot used buyer and publisher agents to activate nearly $10,000 in media without an SSP intermediary. According to Butler/Till, campaign CPMs were 42% below the client’s direct-buying benchmark, while also delivering a higher share of premium podcast placements.

Media Briefing: Ads for AI agents have a measurement problem.

As publishers experiment with serving ads to AI agents, measurement and attribution remain major obstacles. Tracking whether an AI crawler accessed an ad does not reveal whether it influenced an AI-generated response or ultimately affected a purchase. Several approaches are being tested, but no standard has emerged yet. The IAB is now developing an attribution framework for agentic advertising.

Clarifying the AAMP Scope: Why So Many AAMP vs. AdCP Comparisons Miss the Mark.

IAB Tech Lab has clarified the scope of its Agentic Ad Management Protocols (AAMP), challenging descriptions of AAMP as primarily an impression-level framework. AAMP spans a much broader advertising workflow, including campaign planning, media and audience discovery, negotiation, deals and ordering, as well as real-time execution. The clarification also challenges the idea that AAMP and AdCP represent two clearly separated, complementary layers.

While the frameworks have different design philosophies, they overlap across several functions, including planning, discovery, negotiation, campaign execution and buyer and seller agents. AAMP is designed to build on existing advertising standards and infrastructure, supporting agentic workflows across the advertising lifecycle while enabling integration with systems and processes already widely used across the industry.

‘Waste in the system’: Why Georgia-Pacific is holding out on buying agents.

Georgia-Pacific is holding back on using AI agents for programmatic buying, arguing that automation will not solve existing inefficiencies in the advertising supply chain. The company is instead focusing on reducing SSPs, improving inventory quality and tightening control over what it buys. Its view is that agentic buying could eventually bring value, but automating inefficient processes risks simply reproducing the same problems faster.

Ad Tech Briefing: TV measurement’s competitive reset gathers pace (with more job cuts).

The TV measurement market is undergoing rapid change following Nielsen’s $2.15 billion agreement to acquire DoubleVerify, alongside workforce reductions at VideoAmp and Comscore. The developments point to a broader shift in measurement, where scale, differentiated data and AI-enabled workflows are becoming increasingly important. Competition is moving beyond standalone measurement toward combining signals across planning, activation and attribution.

Germany Antitrust Regulator Forces Changes to Apple’s App Tracking Transparency.

Apple has agreed to change its App Tracking Transparency framework in Germany following intervention by the country’s antitrust regulator. Apple will more closely align consent prompts for its own services and third-party apps, while app publishers will have more scope to explain the role of personalised advertising. Publishers will also be able to combine Apple’s consent prompt with other privacy consent requests, simplifying the user experience.

▸ Week 33

• - The Public Ad Tech Era Is Over
• - European Publishers Hit Harder by AI Bot Scraping
• - How Publishers Diversify Google Replacements
• - Streaming Inventory Price Decreases
• - A Milestone for the Agentic Advertising Ecosystem
• - French Publishers Seeking AI Compensation
• - New Bill Targets Shady Scraping Bots

Future of Marketing Briefing: The public ad tech era is over.

Public markets are rapidly losing faith in ad tech, driving companies such as DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science, LiveRamp and potentially Criteo toward private ownership. Investors now demand sustained, defensible growth and punish even profitable companies when revenue slows, as seen with The Trade Desk, while selectively rewarding businesses such as Magnite, PubMatic and lately Nexxen.

The industry is splitting between infrastructure and measurement firms better suited to private ownership and a small group of public platforms that can still demonstrate durable competitive advantages. However, private equity is not an easy fallback, as funds that bought at inflated 2021-22 valuations are struggling to exit and increasingly need creative debt-based structures to generate returns.

European publishers are getting hit harder by AI bot scraping, report finds.

TollBit reports that European publishers receive four times more AI scraping than North American sites, while gaining far fewer human referrals and having robots.txt restrictions ignored nearly three times as often. The imbalance worsened during early 2026, with Europe’s scrape-to-referral ratio rising from 150:1 to 227:1 between the first and second quarters.

One possible explanation is growing demand for multilingual training data, although TollBit’s publisher mix may also have influenced the results. Cloudflare and DataDome data do not confirm a consistent regional divide, suggesting scraping levels vary heavily by publisher and that the underlying reasons remain unclear.

Media Briefing: Publishers are replacing Google with a little bit of everything.

Publishers are trying to reduce their dependence on Google, but no single channel can replace the traffic, discovery and revenue it provides. The New York Times is investing heavily in video, while People Inc., USA Today and Ziff Davis are expanding across social, newsletters, events, apps and other direct-audience channels.

News Corp is better insulated through subscriptions and B2B revenue, whereas BuzzFeed is adapting by cutting fixed costs and using a flexible contributor model tied to traffic. The emerging strategy is therefore diversification: building stronger audience relationships and multiple revenue streams instead of replacing Google with another dominant platform.

Future of TV Briefing: In TV ad market’s swing to streaming, cheap inventory is in demand.

Streaming is taking a growing share of TV advertising, accounting for over half of Disney’s entertainment ad revenue and rising to 27% at Paramount and 18% at Warner Bros. Discovery. However, streaming growth is not offsetting the much steeper decline in traditional TV advertising at Paramount and WBD.

Expanding ad inventory is outpacing advertiser demand, increasing impressions while pushing prices down across platforms such as Disney and Roku. This buyer-friendly market is encouraging services including Disney and Netflix to consider free, ad-supported tiers, while lower-cost platforms such as Tubi appear better positioned.

A Milestone for the Agentic Advertising Ecosystem.

IAB Tech Lab and the Agentic Task Force have finalized version 1.0 of the Agentic Real Time Framework (ARTF), moving the real-time agentic layer for OpenRTB from proof of concept to a stable, production-ready standard already being used by several companies. ARTF allows specialized agents to run securely inside programmatic infrastructure and supports use cases including privacy and consent verification, fraud detection, specialized bidding, audience augmentation, deal activation, measurement and vector embedding processing.

Version 1.0 adds orchestration between ARTF nodes, a Rust reference implementation, alignment with OpenRTB gRPC and clearer health endpoint requirements. Development of v2 is already underway, with IAB Tech Lab inviting the industry to propose new features and use cases based on production experience.

French Publishers File Complaint with Antitrust Authority Seeking AI Overview Compensation.

French publisher group APIG has filed a competition complaint seeking payment from Google for allegedly using its members’ content in AI Overviews and AI Mode without consent or separate remuneration. APIG says it supports AI innovation but wants Google to negotiate fair compensation, particularly as AI summaries are estimated to contribute significantly to publishers’ traffic losses.

A New Bill Targets ‘Bad Bots’ That Scrape Websites Without Permission.

The bipartisan Stealth Bot Prohibition Act would require AI crawlers to disclose their identity and purpose, with violations punishable by fines of up to $53,000. Publishers say stealth bots evade robots.txt rules, disguise themselves as human traffic and scrape content for resale or AI training without permission, harming revenue and increasing misinformation risks.

The activity also strains publishers’ infrastructure. Axel Springer says bot management now accounts for 25% of Politico’s hosting costs, and raises national-security concerns because many crawlers originate abroad. Supporters view the bill as a first step toward enforceable licensing and attribution frameworks, although its passage remains uncertain amid broader resistance to stricter AI regulation.

▸ Week 32

• - The Trade Desk bets on a new measurement framework
• - 57% of CTV programmatic is served on large screens
• - Publishers debate markdown for AI bots
• - Nielsen acquires DoubleVerify for $2.15 billion
• - Magnite expands its ambitions with Orchestration
• - Stealth crawlers create a growing challenge for publishers
• - People Inc. grows digital revenues despite steep traffic declines
• - AI agents give publishers a new way to monetise their data

The Trade Desk bets on measurement to support its recovery.

The Trade Desk missed its Q2 forecast by $36 million, reporting $715.1 million in revenue as slower spending, price-cutting competitors and advertisers prioritising cheaper transactions weighed on growth. CEO Jeff Green argues that simplistic last-click and last-view measurement undervalues premium open-internet advertising and encourages buyers to sacrifice decision-making for lower prices.

The company is now betting on a new measurement framework and Audience Unlimited, an AI-powered subscription product combining audience targeting with outcome tracking, to prove advertising’s incremental value more clearly. Despite strong growth among strategically aligned clients, overall revenue rose only 3%, leaving The Trade Desk under pressure to execute faster as Amazon and Google expand in programmatic and CTV.

Study finds 57% of CTV programmatic is served on large screens.

According to Pixalate, Smart TVs account for 57% of U.S. open-programmatic CTV spending, led by Amazon Fire TV, while smaller devices account for 43%. Open auctions represent roughly $6–7.5 billion of the overall CTV ad market.

Across all deal types, programmatic transactions now account for an estimated 84–88% of total U.S. CTV ad spending, with reality programming and news attracting the largest shares of open-programmatic investment.

Media Briefing: The case for and against markdown for AI bots.

Some publishers, including Time, are creating stripped-down markdown versions of their sites to make content cheaper and easier for AI systems to process, potentially improving visibility, citations and monetisation opportunities. Supporters argue that markdown reduces parsing errors and token use — by about 90% in TollBit’s experience — while enabling experiments such as serving ads directly to AI agents.

However, critics warn that markdown can make unpaid scraping easier, weaken publishers’ control over their content and has not yet been proven to increase AI citations or advertising performance. Google says markdown is unnecessary for its AI-powered search features and neither helps nor harms rankings, leaving publishers to weigh speculative visibility gains against immediate commercial and licensing risks.

Nielsen is acquiring DoubleVerify for $2.15 billion.

Nielsen will acquire DoubleVerify for approximately $2.15 billion, combining its audience measurement capabilities with DV’s ad verification, attribution and optimisation technology while taking DoubleVerify private.

The deal could create a stronger end-to-end measurement platform, but Nielsen will also need to convince advertisers that DoubleVerify’s verification services remain independent and unbiased under its ownership.

Magnite expands beyond the traditional SSP role with its Orchestration product.

Magnite is expanding beyond the traditional SSP role by adding DSP-like capabilities for campaign planning, audience packaging, demand routing and AI-powered optimisation, although the company insists it is not trying to replace DSPs. The shift is supported by strong Q2 performance, including 11% overall revenue growth and a 36% increase in CTV revenue excluding traffic-acquisition costs.

Through partnerships with commerce-media companies such as Walmart, PayPal and CVS, Magnite aims to make first-party data, inventory and measurement accessible across multiple DSPs rather than locking them within one platform. As buyer and seller agents become more common, Magnite is positioning its Orchestration product as the infrastructure connecting them, arguing that modern SSPs must deliver far more value than simply aggregating demand.

WTF is a stealth crawler?

Stealth crawlers scrape publishers’ content while disguising themselves as ordinary users, often bypassing robots.txt controls and hiding who is taking the content or why. The problem is escalating rapidly, with AI scraper traffic rising 597% during 2025 and an emerging scraper economy estimated to be worth billions of dollars.

Publishers are responding with increasingly aggressive bot-blocking measures designed to add costs and friction, protect their content and preserve leverage for licensing negotiations. Proposed legislation in New York and Congress would require bots to disclose their identity and purpose, enabling enforcement, penalties and greater accountability for unauthorised scraping.

People Inc. grows digital revenues despite steep search traffic declines.

People Inc.’s core site visits fell 22% year over year as Google Search referrals dropped 40%, reducing Google’s share of its traffic from roughly two-thirds historically to 21%. Despite this, digital revenue grew 6% through subscriptions, events, licensing and off-platform distribution, while advertising revenue remained flat and open-marketplace programmatic revenue increased.

The publisher protected ad income by bundling website inventory with assets such as social media and live events, while growing scarcity of quality content allowed it to command higher programmatic prices. People Inc. may eventually block Google over uncompensated AI crawling, but for now the remaining search traffic is still too valuable to sacrifice.

AI agents are giving publishers a new way to monetise their data.

PubMatic and Optable are connecting buy- and sell-side AI agents to automate end-to-end programmatic campaigns, including the creation of tailored audiences for private marketplace deals. The workflow enables publishers to activate previously underused first-party data in real time while reducing the manual workload involved in packaging inventory and promoting audiences to buyers.

Early adopters such as Mediavine and Livewire see the technology as a way to prove the value of publisher data, access more demand and secure a stronger role for the sell side in agentic advertising. For PubMatic, introducing buyer-agent capabilities also creates differentiation in a commoditised SSP market, although agencies may initially redirect direct-buy budgets rather than existing programmatic spend towards these campaigns.

▸ Week 31

• - Agentic Advertising Matures with AAMP 2.3
• - Publishers Can’t Quit Google’s Crawlers Yet
• - Time Starts Serving Ads to AI Agents
  
• - FreeWheel Adds Show-level Reporting
• - IAB Introduces Redefining Media Types
• - Why PubMatic Ditched Its Prebid Web Wrapper, But Not Its SDK
• - Digital Publisher Revenues Fell 4.55% in Q1 2026

Agentic Advertising Matures with AAMP 2.3.

AAMP 2.3 advances agentic media buying from early demonstrations to scalable deployment within enterprise advertising systems. It adds stronger interoperability, cloud deployment options, horizontal scaling, support for multiple AI model providers, and integrations with platforms such as Google Ad Manager and Meta Ads.

Governance improvements include vendor approval controls, standards-based authentication, and pricing provenance that prevents agents from inventing CPM values. It also makes audiences transaction-ready through structured, auditable audience data, moving AAMP closer to trustworthy adoption at scale, although further development is still needed.

Media Briefing: Threatening to Quit Google’s Crawlers Is Just Publishers’ New Hope.

Although publishers are increasingly frustrated that Google’s AI features use their content while reducing referral traffic, most remain too dependent on Google for audience reach and revenue to block its crawlers. Unless publishers can opt out of AI features without disappearing from search, collective regulation or litigation is more realistic than individual publishers cutting ties.

Time Has Started Serving Ads to AI Agents.

Time has begun selling ads designed specifically for AI agents, with Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute among the first buyers. Working with Mobian, it converts webpages into AI-readable markdown and inserts sponsored FAQ-style content intended to influence how brands appear in generative search results.

Time sees this as a premium new revenue stream from rapidly growing bot traffic, with performance measured through AI visibility, favourability and accuracy. However, it remains unclear how LLMs will treat sponsored content or whether these pages could eventually be penalised as promotional manipulation.

Future of TV Briefing: FreeWheel Adds Show-level Reporting to Tackle Streaming’s Transparency Problem.

FreeWheel is introducing free, post-campaign show-level reporting for Buyer Cloud advertisers, revealing which programmes carried their ads about two hours after delivery. Participating publishers, including NBCUniversal, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, control the level of detail shared, such as impressions, timing, device type and spend.

Keeping this data out of the programmatic bidstream helps avoid privacy risks, but publishers still worry advertisers may use it to demand lower prices or cherry-pick popular shows. To make the transparency commercially useful, the industry must standardise show titles and connect programme-level placement data with campaign performance.

WTF Is the IAB’s Redefining Media Types Standard?

The IAB’s new Redefining Media Types framework aims to standardise how digital video formats are classified based on both technology and consumer experience. A shared taxonomy could improve transparency in planning, buying and measurement while preventing costly errors as AI agents increasingly handle media transactions.

Why PubMatic Ditched Its Prebid Web Wrapper, But Never Its SDK.

PubMatic has discontinued its OpenWrap Web wrapper and will recommend Playwire to the roughly 250 publishers using it. The decision reflects the maturity of web header bidding, where specialist vendors can now manage wrappers and PubMatic can access inventory regardless of which wrapper a publisher uses.

By contrast, PubMatic is retaining OpenWrap SDK, which serves 750–1,000 app publishers and is essential for accessing and monetising mobile-app inventory. The shift highlights PubMatic’s stronger growth expectations for mobile apps and the potentially shrinking strategic value of the open web.

Digital Publisher Revenues Saw 4.55% YoY Decline in Q1 2026, AOP and Deloitte Data Reveals.

UK digital publisher revenues fell 4.55% year-on-year to £152.91 million in Q1 2026, ending four consecutive quarters of growth. Display advertising rose 5.06% and drove almost all growth, while subscriptions increased by only 0.63%.

Sharp declines affected miscellaneous, classified, off-platform and digital audio revenues, partly reflecting AI’s growing impact on referral traffic and information discovery. Although 62% of publishers reported growth, participants are increasingly prioritising advertising, cost reductions and acquisitions as pressure mounts on other revenue streams.

▸ Week 30

• - Warner Bros. Discovery Creates Value with Pause Ads
• - Brand Authority and Trust Become Publishers’ Newest AI Assets
• - ExchangeWire’s Media Pulse H1 2026
• - New CTV Ad Format Signaling Standards
• - CTV Needs a Shared Standard for Quality
• - Debate Continues Around W3C’s Attribution API
• - Reach Moves Away from High-Volume Publishing
• - Google Search Traffic to UK Publishers Could Halve

How Warner Bros. Discovery Is Creating Value Out Of Dead Air With Pause Ads.

Pause ads create new, user-initiated advertising inventory without interrupting streaming content, though early versions often frustrated viewers. Consumer acceptance appears to be improving, with research showing strong preference among younger audiences and meaningful actions such as product searches and social media visits.

Warner Bros. Discovery is developing more relevant formats through contextual targeting and interactive shopping experiences tied to what viewers see on screen. Advertiser adoption remains limited by inconsistent formats, insufficient performance data and a lack of programmatic standards, so most pause ads are currently sold through direct deals.

Media Briefing: Brand authority and trust are becoming publishers’ newest AI assets.

LLMs increasingly surface trusted, authoritative publishers, making brand credibility a potential competitive advantage as discovery shifts from search engines to AI assistants. Because users still frequently distrust and double-check AI-generated answers, AI platforms need accurate, attributable content from reputable media brands.

This creates new revenue opportunities through licensing deals, AI visibility insights and generative engine optimisation, although larger publishers are currently benefiting far more than smaller ones. Authority strongly improves AI mentions and citations, but niche publishers can still compete by producing highly specific, useful content that answers prompts better than established brands.

ExchangeWire's Media Pulse H1 2026.

ExchangeWire’s Media Pulse H1 2026 reports renewed advertising confidence, with 67% planning to increase spend and half raising their forecasts again by midyear. AI adoption and measurement capabilities are also advancing, but concerns about AI reliability, fragmented attribution and balancing short- and long-term impact remain.

What’s New in CTV Ad Format Signaling.

The IAB Tech Lab is finalising standardised signaling for emerging CTV formats such as pause, home-screen, overlay, screensaver, in-scene and squeezeback ads. Until now, these formats relied on custom integrations, limiting transparency, consistency and programmatic trading through OpenRTB.

The proposal extends existing AdCOM, VAST and Native standards so publishers can accurately describe opportunities and buyers can deliver compatible creatives through real-time bidding. This gives advertisers clearer buying and reporting, publishers broader programmatic demand and creative control, and ad tech providers a common framework for serving and measuring these formats.

Future of TV Briefing: The streaming ad industry finally has levers to pull on quality.

The IAB’s proposed Redefining Media Types Standard aims to create a shared classification system that helps buyers assess the quality and true value of digital video inventory. It categorises placements by viewing environment, such as home TVs, personal devices and public screens, and attributes including sound, skippability, targeting signals and content type.

These signals could improve programmatic transparency, reduce misrepresented inventory and let advertisers configure campaigns according to their own quality standards, though the framework remains more binary than the spectrum-based approach some researchers recommend. A clear taxonomy will become even more important as streaming buying grows increasingly automated and advertisers need guardrails to teach AI agents what qualifies as acceptable media.

Fears of Big Tech bias underpin debates around W3C’s Attribution API.

The W3C is developing an Attribution API, backed by Apple, Google, Meta and Mozilla, to measure advertising conversions across browsers without tracking individual users through third-party cookies. The proposal would aggregate data through approved services and apply differential-privacy noise, with supporters arguing that this creates a more transparent, auditable and user-controlled system.

Critics warn that Big Tech has disproportionate influence, the API may favor lower-funnel platforms such as search and social, and aggregated outputs lack the flexibility marketers need for custom attribution. A formal W3C recommendation is expected by the end of 2026, and the standard could be more consequential than Google’s Privacy Sandbox if adopted across all major browsers.

Reach moves away from ‘volume’ as traffic, revenue and share price plunge.

Reach is shifting from high-volume publishing toward original journalism, subscriptions, quality video and AI licensing after first-half revenue fell 9% and Google referral traffic dropped 55%. Despite improved revenue per page view and early subscription growth, the company expects further job cuts as it reduces reliance on programmatic advertising and manages continued declines in print and digital revenue.

Google search traffic to leading UK publishers set to halve by Q3 2027.

The AOP’s new Artificial Intelligence Publisher Impact Study found that organic Google referrals to major UK publishers fell 7.1% between Q1 and Q2 2025 as AI summaries increasingly turned search from a gateway into a destination. The impact varied sharply: news publishers proved more resilient than consumer and B2B sites, while sports, travel and health content grew but technology, finance and business declined.

How-to and guide content suffered the greatest losses because AI can easily replace basic information retrieval, whereas opinion, interviews and other distinctive human-led content held steady or gained traffic. Publishers should therefore prioritise original, differentiated content and diversified revenue models instead of increasing output to chase declining search volume.

▸ Week 29

• - What Is LLM Honeypotting?
• - AI Visibility Is Publishers’ Newest Currency
• - Reddit Questions AI Deals’ Impact on Its Ad Business
• - Publisher Ad Supply Fell by up to 40% in Q2
• - IAB Europe Announces New TCF Governance Board
• - Buyers Raise the Bar in CTV Transparency
• - OpenAI Ad Business Set to Miss Forecast by 90%

WTF is LLM honeypotting?

“LLM honeypotting” adapts an old cybersecurity tactic to deter AI crawlers by slowing them down, trapping them in endless content mazes, or feeding them plausible but useless data. The aim is not necessarily to stop scraping entirely, but to make large-scale crawling more expensive and less profitable.

However, critics argue that sophisticated scrapers can detect or bypass these traps, while publishers may incur significant costs running them. For now, the approach remains experimental and best suited to larger publishers or e-commerce sites with valuable content and affordable edge-computing infrastructure.

Media Briefing: AI visibility is becoming publishers’ newest currency.

Publishers such as Axios, Forbes, Time and The Washington Post are turning their prominence in AI-generated answers into GEO marketing products that help brands improve their own visibility and citations. Demand is being driven by brands that increasingly view AI discoverability as an important measure of online influence beyond traditional reach, traffic and SEO.

However, AI visibility remains difficult to prove because analytics vendors use inconsistent data and methodologies, with no recognised industry standard. Despite these limitations, premium publishers are using citation rankings, crawler traffic and other proxy metrics to position their authoritative content as valuable influence within the AI ecosystem.

Reddit questions if AI data deals could hurt its ad business.

Reddit is debating whether licensing its community content to OpenAI and Google weakens the unique data advantage behind its advertising products. The company argues that AI firms receive raw content – not the engagement and advertising signals used for targeting – but admits the long-term risk remains unresolved.

Publisher ad supply fell by up to 40% in Q2 as AI search choked the open web.

According to benchmarking data from Ozone, publisher ad supply fell by roughly 32–41% year over year in Q2 2026 as AI answers, zero-click search and social platforms reduced referral traffic to open-web sites. Higher eCPMs – especially in the U.K. – partly offset the decline, but combined programmatic spend across Ozone’s U.S. and U.K. publisher cohort still dropped 30.6% in the first half of the year.

The U.S. market performed worse due to weaker yield growth and an additional confidence shock linked to the Iran–U.S. conflict, while apps were the only channel to achieve year-over-year growth in June. Executives increasingly view this as a structural reset, pushing publishers toward scarcer, higher-quality inventory, first-party data, subscriptions, apps, newsletters and events.

IAB Europe Announces New Governance Board its Transparency & Consent Framework.

IAB Europe has announced the new 15-member TCF Governance Board, chaired by Schibsted’s Christer Ljones with Google’s Mary Xiaoyong Liu Wang as vice chair. Representing advertisers, technology intermediaries and media owners, the board will oversee accountability and ensure the TCF continues to support compliance with the GDPR and ePrivacy Directive.

Digital video ad spending is booming — trust in premium inventory isn’t.

U.S. digital video ad spending is expected to exceed $80 billion this year, but buyers’ confidence in inventory quality and transparency has not kept pace. Confidence is lowest in open exchanges and private marketplaces, reflecting fragmented supply chains, inconsistent measurement and uncertainty about where ads actually appear.

As the meaning of “premium” content becomes less clear, agencies increasingly use third-party measurement and direct relationships with SSPs to verify inventory quality. Buyers now judge quality less by the purchasing method and more by whether the complete path of each impression can be clearly explained.

OpenAI ad business set to miss forecast by 90%.

OpenAI’s advertising business is projected to fall about 90% short of its own five-year revenue forecast, according to Emarketer. While OpenAI expects ad revenue to reach $100 billion by 2030, Emarketer estimates that the entire standalone chatbot category will generate only $5.41 billion in U.S. ad revenue that year.

▸ Week 28

• - More Publisher Control on How AI Accesses Content
• - TIME’s CMS Transition Supports AI-Driven Content
• - MFA Ad Spend Increases as AI Slop Grows
• - Netflix Expands into Short-Form Video
• - Publishers Urged to Test Google’s AI Opt-out
• - European Digital Advertising Reaches €131 Billion
• - European Media Marketplace Formed
• - Advertisers Await Programmatic Pause Ads

Media Briefing: Declared ‘good bots,’ mixed-use crawlers, gray scrapers – how AI accesses publisher content.

Cloudflare is introducing new default rules that will allow search indexing but block AI training and agentic use by mixed-use crawlers on ad-supported pages, aiming to give publishers more control over how their content is used. While this could make it harder for compliant AI companies to scrape content for free, experts argue that the biggest challenge remains stealth scrapers that bypass protections using proxies and other techniques.

Industry voices believe publishers need stronger technical defences to raise the cost of unauthorised scraping and encourage AI companies toward licensing agreements. Meanwhile, new models such as Ceramic's partnership with Cloudflare propose a transparent, paid ecosystem where AI companies access publisher content through licensed APIs, and publishers earn revenue based on actual AI usage.

How TIME’s CMS Transition Laid The Foundation For Its AI-Driven Content Overhaul.

TIME migrated from WordPress to an AI-first enterprise CMS, Contentstack, to unify over 100 years of fragmented content and create a stronger foundation for AI products and integrations. The new platform enables AI-friendly content formatting, powers TIME's AI chatbot and search experiences, and simplifies integrations with partners through an API-first architecture.

Beyond the technology upgrade, the migration also improved editorial workflows with AI-powered automation, such as content tagging, and delivered richer cross-platform analytics. TIME sees this investment as essential for improving content discoverability, personalisation, and direct audience engagement as AI search continues to reduce traditional referral traffic.

MFA Ad Spend Is Increasing. Is AI Slop To Blame?

ANA's latest benchmark report shows that ad spend on MFA sites rose slightly for the first time since 2023, with lower-performing advertisers allocating more budget to MFA inventory than higher-performing ones. The increase is partly attributed to the rise of AI-generated "slop" content, which makes it easier to create low-quality, ad-heavy websites at scale, although AI slop and MFA are not identical.

SSPs and ad tech companies are responding by tightening supply chain quality controls, vetting publishers, and using a mix of automated detection and human audits to block both MFA and AI slop. Industry experts argue that the long-term solution is for advertisers to prioritise campaign performance and quality over cheap impressions, reducing the financial incentive for low-quality inventory.

Netflix Pushes Further Into Short-Form Video with Slate of Publisher Partnerships.

Netflix is expanding beyond TV shows and films by bringing popular digital video series from publishers like BuzzFeed, Condé Nast, and People onto its platform, reinforcing its goal of becoming a comprehensive video destination. The move is aimed at keeping viewers within Netflix's ecosystem and competing more directly with YouTube for both TV viewing time and advertising revenue.

‘Travesty’ if publishers don’t take up chance to opt out of Google AI Overviews.

Publishing leaders are urging publishers to actively test Google's new AI opt-out controls, arguing that early experimentation is essential to understand the impact on traffic, discoverability, and future negotiations with Google. Publishers will need to choose between building closed, direct audience destinations or optimising content for AI discovery, as balancing may become difficult.

The panel also emphasised that AI companies should compensate publishers fairly for content use, with some advocating for payment based on how much a publisher's content contributes to AI-generated answers rather than simply being used as training data. Finally, publishers were encouraged to collaborate through industry initiatives like SPUR while also pursuing individual licensing deals, to strengthen their bargaining power and establish common standards for AI content attribution and transparency.

IAB Europe’s AdEx Benchmark 2025 Report: European Digital Advertising Market Records 10.5% Growth to Reach €131 Billion.

IAB Europe's 2025 AdEx Benchmark Report found that European digital advertising grew 10.5% to €131 billion, despite economic uncertainty, demonstrating continued advertiser confidence in digital channels. Growth was driven primarily by video (+19.6%), social advertising (+19.2%), and Retail Media (+16.7%), reflecting increasing demand for engaging, measurable, and commerce-focused advertising environments.

Video now accounts for more than half of all display ad spend for the first time, while Retail Media has surpassed 10% of total digital advertising investment, highlighting a structural shift in the market. Meanwhile, mature Western European markets maintained steady growth of around 10%, whereas Nordic and Baltic markets experienced flatter performance.

European Telcos, Retailers, and Ad Tech Companies Form European Media Marketplace.

The European Media Marketplace is a new collaboration between major European telecom, retail, data, and ad tech companies that will offer advertisers a single access point to buy campaigns across CTV, video, display, native, and retail media while allowing each partner to retain control of its own inventory and data. Launching first in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy, the initiative aims to simplify media buying.

The marketplace emphasises a privacy-by-design approach that complies with European data regulations while enabling effective audience targeting and measurement. It also positions itself as a sovereign European alternative to dominant US advertising platforms by reducing intermediaries and returning more value directly to media owners.

Advertisers Await Programmatic Pause Ads.

Advertisers are interested in pause ads for streaming TV, but adoption remains limited because there is no standardised way to buy them programmatically across platforms. The IAB Tech Lab is finalising new standards that aim to simplify buying, improve interoperability, and unlock broader demand, while companies like Magnite and FreeWheel are already building interim solutions.

Publishers expect standardisation to increase competition for inventory and drive higher revenue, with pause ads already commanding higher CPMs than traditional video ads in some cases. However, widespread adoption will ultimately depend not only on easier buying but also on proving that pause ads consistently deliver stronger performance and a positive user experience.

▸ Week 27

• - Relevant Digital Launches Dynamic Placement Insertion for Publishers
• - IAB Europe Releases Guide to Programmatic Curation
• - CMA Moves to Loosen App Store Payment Rules
• - New Rules Could Restrict "Surveillance Pricing"
• - Publishers Rebuild the Web for AI Agents
• - The Economist Expands into Premium Audio and Video
• - UK Publishers Unite Around Curated Ad Inventory
  

Relevant Digital Launches Dynamic Placement Insertion to Help Publishers Unlock New Ad Revenue Opportunities.

This is a new Relevant Yield feature that automatically inserts additional ad placements within existing content environments. Using configurable rules, it helps publishers unlock new revenue opportunities without hardcoded placements or extensive development work, while maintaining control over the user experience.

Particularly effective on mobile web and content-rich pages, the feature enables publishers to test, optimise and scale inventory with minimal operational effort. Early results have been promising, with a publisher reporting a 174% revenue increase as part of its broader ad stack optimisation. The feature is included at no additional cost with Relevant Yield’s HB Manager and HB Analytics.

IAB Europe’s Guide to Curation in Digital Advertising.

IAB Europe’s Programmatic Working Group developed a guide explaining how curated marketplaces work in programmatic advertising, including how inventory, data and signals are packaged to improve transparency and efficiency across the supply chain. It also outlines key considerations around transparency, fees, measurement and control, providing practical guidance for publishers, advertisers, agencies and other digital advertising professionals.

CMA targets Apple and Google app stores: ‘Good news for publishers’.

The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has proposed new rules that would allow app developers, including publishers, to direct users to external payment options, bypassing Apple and Google's mandatory in-app payment systems and reducing commission fees. The changes could help publishers increase subscription revenue, retain customer data, and reduce reliance on platform-controlled payments, following concerns that current rules limit competition and innovation.

While the proposals have been welcomed by the publishing industry, some stakeholders argue they should also explicitly restrict fees on transactions completed outside Apple and Google's payment systems. The reforms are currently under consultation and form part of broader efforts to increase competition in the UK mobile app ecosystem.

Media Briefing: ‘Surveillance pricing’ laws are coming for dynamic subscription strategies.

Publishers' subscription pricing strategies are facing increased scrutiny as new legislation aims to restrict the use of personal data to determine individualised prices, a practice known as "surveillance pricing". While dynamic pricing based on factors such as introductory offers and churn prediction is expected to remain permissible, using personally identifiable information like browsing history or location to personalise prices could be prohibited or require greater transparency.

Publishers are being advised to review their pricing practices ahead of the legislation, with violations potentially resulting in significant fines. The proposed rules have sparked debate, with supporters arguing they protect consumers from discriminatory pricing, while critics warn they could reduce publishers' ability to offer targeted discounts and retain price-sensitive subscribers.

How Time and others are rebuilding parts of the web for AI agents.

As AI agents become a larger source of web traffic, publishers are adapting their websites to make content easier for AI systems to access, process and cite. Publishers like Time and The Economist are experimenting with agent-friendly formats such as markdown, selective bot access and emerging standards like WebMCP to improve visibility in AI search while reducing infrastructure costs.

These changes also support internal AI initiatives, but publishers with subscription models are weighing the benefits of AI exposure against the risk of reducing the value of paid content. Industry experts remain divided on whether optimising for AI agents will generate meaningful long-term value, particularly if it leads to fewer human visits and advertising opportunities.

The Economist launches new audio and video tier targeting younger subscribers.

The Economist has launched Economist Play, a lower-priced subscription tier focused on premium audio and video content to attract younger, more diverse audiences who prefer listening and watching over reading. The offering includes subscriber-only podcasts, videos, newsletters and games, while also showcasing the journalists behind its traditionally anonymous editorial process to strengthen trust in an AI-driven media landscape.

Initially launching in Canada and the Nordic countries, the product builds on the strong engagement of The Economist Insider, with 75% of subscribers already interacting with the video platform. The move reflects a broader publishing trend of using premium video and audio content to drive subscriber growth and retention as search traffic declines and media consumption habits evolve.

Why Major UK Publishers Are Finally Joining Forces To Curate Ad Inventory.

A group of leading UK publishers has launched Atria, a publisher-led curation collective that combines premium inventory across more than 100 media brands to simplify programmatic buying and strengthen publishers' control over curated deals. By offering advertisers a single, transparent path to high-quality inventory and shared audience segments, Atria aims to improve campaign performance while competing more effectively with social platforms and AI-driven traffic challenges.

The initiative also enables publishers to leverage first-party data at scale without sharing proprietary information, with technology provided by Permutive. Early campaigns have delivered promising results, including significantly higher click-through rates, suggesting publisher-led curation could become an increasingly attractive alternative to third-party curated marketplaces.

▸ Week 26

• - Amazon expands its media business across commerce, streaming and TV measurement
• - Publishers at Cannes look beyond AI hype to real revenue models
• - EBU calls for stronger rules to protect trusted media visibility
• - UK publishers push for AI crawler transparency and content licensing
• - IAB Tech Lab updates SupplyChain standard for greater programmatic transparency
• - OpenAI officially enters the advertising business with ChatGPT ads
• - Omnicom unlocks cross-platform CTV measurement for reach and frequency
  

Amazon expands media footprint with iHeart sales deal and new TV outcome tool.

Amazon is expanding its media business by deepening its partnership with iHeartMedia and launching a new TV measurement tool. The expanded agreement allows iHeart's 1,000+ salespeople to sell advertising across Prime Video, Twitch, Fire TV, Amazon Music and Alexa, significantly extending Amazon's reach across streaming media.

Amazon also introduced Outcome Optimizer, a new tool that combines shopping, browsing and streaming signals to optimise programmatic guaranteed TV campaigns through FreeWheel. The move reflects a broader shift towards outcome-based TV advertising, where commerce and retail data are increasingly used to measure campaign performance. It also strengthens Amazon's position as a media and advertising platform spanning content, commerce, and measurement.

Media Briefing: Inside publishers’ real Cannes agenda – AI money vs agentic hype.

While AI dominated conversations at Cannes Lions, publishers focused on a more practical question: who will pay for the open web in an AI-driven market? Discussions centred on whether AI-powered media buying and emerging AI business models can generate real revenue or simply introduce another layer of intermediaries and fees.

Publishers also explored AI licensing, bot management and new revenue models, while seeking greater control over how their content and data are used by AI platforms. Although agentic media buying is gaining momentum, most publishers see it as an emerging concept rather than a proven source of advertising revenue.

EBU Calls for European Legislation “With Teeth” to Protect PSB Prominence Against Big Tech Gatekeepers.

The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) is urging the European Commission to strengthen media prominence rules as part of the upcoming review of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD). The organisation argues that trusted media should remain easily discoverable across digital platforms as AI, algorithms and streaming interfaces increasingly shape how audiences find content.

The EBU also warned that AI Overviews and zero-click search could reduce publisher search traffic by nearly half over the next three years. It is calling for legally binding rules that ensure trusted media remains visible across emerging AI-powered interfaces rather than relying solely on commercial platform algorithms.

UK news industry backs law to stop deceptive AI scraping.

The UK news industry is backing proposed legislation that would require AI crawlers to identify themselves and disclose how scraped content will be used. The bill aims to give publishers greater visibility into who is accessing their websites and strengthen their ability to negotiate licensing agreements with AI companies.

The proposal follows similar legislation in New York and reflects growing concerns over deceptive AI scraping. As publishers seek new ways to protect their content, the focus is shifting from simply blocking bots to creating transparent rules for content access, licensing and compensation.

IAB Tech Lab Announces SupplyChain v1.1 Transparency Upgrade to Strengthen Trust in the Open Internet.

IAB Tech Lab has introduced SupplyChain v1.1, a proposed update to the OpenRTB SupplyChain Object (schain) that gives buyers greater visibility into how programmatic bid requests are created and handled. The upgrade expands transparency beyond payment flows to include the technical infrastructure involved in each transaction, such as Prebid, ad servers, SDKs and wrappers.

The update aims to improve supply path optimisation by helping buyers identify duplicate bid requests and better understand how inventory reaches them. By increasing transparency across the programmatic supply chain, IAB Tech Lab hopes to strengthen trust in the open internet and encourage investment in high-quality inventory.

At Its First-Ever Cannes, OpenAI Says ‘We Are Clearly In The Advertising Business Now’.

At its first Cannes Lions appearance, OpenAI confirmed it is clearly in the advertising business, positioning advertising as a way to expand access to AI while creating a new revenue stream. The company says more than 900 million people now use ChatGPT every week, with around 20% of queries already showing direct commercial intent.

Since launching its ads pilot earlier this year, OpenAI has introduced an ad manager, conversion tracking, international expansion, and CPC bidding alongside CPM. The move signals the emergence of AI chat platforms as a new advertising channel, where campaigns are designed to help users complete tasks rather than simply capture attention.

Omnicom Can Now Measure Ad Frequency Across Multiple CTV Platforms.

Omnicom Media has introduced new cross-platform measurement capabilities that allow advertisers to measure campaign reach, frequency and performance across multiple streaming platforms and linear TV within a single clean room. The update helps brands understand how often viewers are exposed to the same creative across different publishers.

The new capabilities are designed to reduce ad repetition, improve campaign optimisation and better connect media exposure with business outcomes. By combining identity, measurement and clean room technologies, Omnicom aims to give advertisers a more complete view of CTV performance while improving the viewing experience across streaming platforms.

▸ Week 25

• - USA Today races AI Overviews on World Cup news
• - WPP tests synthetic audiences for programmatic buys
• - Le Monde blocks AI bots and explores subscriber agents
• - CMA calls for fairer and more transparent Google rankings
• - Publishers look to charge AI firms for scraping content
• - 2026 publishing trends: platforms overtake publisher sites
• - Fox plans to acquire Roku for $22 billion

How USA Today Co. is trying to beat AI Overviews on World Cup news.

USA Today is using AI-assisted shell files to pre-build breaking news articles, allowing reporters to publish stories within minutes of an event and gain visibility before Google's AI Overviews begin summarising the news. The strategy helped drive strong Winter Olympics traffic, generating 116 million page views across the USA Today network, and is now being expanded for the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

By combining AI-powered speed with on-the-ground reporting and authoritative journalism, the publisher aims to capture audience attention during the narrow window before AI-generated summaries reduce click-through opportunities. The approach reflects a broader shift in SEO strategy, where publishers are increasingly racing not just against competitors, but against AI search features themselves.

WPP Media is testing synthetic audiences based on charity donations for programmatic buys.

WPP Media has partnered with Givsly to use AI-generated synthetic audiences for programmatic advertising, marking a shift from the industry's previous reluctance to use synthetic data for bid targeting. The audiences are built using charity donation patterns, demographic data, census information, election results, and WPP's own first- and second-party data to model consumer values and behaviours.

Early tests across four beauty and fashion campaigns showed a 2% increase in video completion rates, suggesting more accurate audience targeting and stronger engagement. While supporters see synthetic audiences as a way to target consumers based on values rather than just demographics or browsing behaviour, experts caution that their effectiveness depends entirely on the quality of the underlying data.

Le Monde blocked the bots. Now it’s working out what to do about paying readers showing up as agents.

Le Monde has adopted a strict "no deal, no crawl" policy, blocking nearly all AI bots and non-human traffic unless a licensing agreement is in place, while also exploring how AI agents can access content on behalf of paying subscribers. The publisher is investigating standards such as MCP and OAuth-like authentication that would allow AI assistants to prove a user's subscriber status and access paywalled content without requiring a direct visit to the website or app.

This reflects a broader industry shift as AI-driven traffic is growing much faster than human traffic, prompting publishers to treat AI agents as a new distribution channel rather than just another type of crawler. Despite embracing AI for infrastructure and user experience, Le Monde prohibits AI-generated articles and images in its newsroom, reserving AI for support functions while keeping journalism firmly human-led.

CMA says Google rankings must be fairer and more transparent.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has ordered Google to make its search rankings fairer and more transparent after businesses complained about opaque ranking changes and limited opportunities to challenge them. Google must now use objective, non-discriminatory criteria for organic search rankings and provide clearer communication when algorithm changes may affect businesses.

The regulator has also made Google's data-sharing API a legally binding requirement, strengthening data portability for users and businesses. Publishers welcomed the move but argued that fairness should be judged by actual impacts on traffic and visibility, particularly as AI-powered search features increasingly influence how audiences discover content.

Publishers to bill AI firms for unwanted scraping – and take them to court if they don’t pay.

A group of 31 UK publishers has introduced Search-Only Contracts that aim to charge AI companies for scraping and reusing website content without permission, typically at a rate of £500 per article. The contracts are designed to strengthen existing robots.txt restrictions by creating a legal basis for publishers to pursue small claims against AI firms whose models reproduce their content.

Publishers and industry bodies argue the approach could help establish a market value for content used in AI training and generation, while giving publishers more leverage in licensing negotiations. However, the strategy remains largely untested in court, meaning its effectiveness in forcing AI companies such as Google and OpenAI to pay for scraped content has yet to be proven.

Publishing trends for 2026: Tech platforms overtake publishers as global news source.

The 2026 Reuters Digital News Report found that social media and video platforms have overtaken TV and publisher websites as the world's leading source of news, with 54% of people accessing news through platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and X. While AI chatbot use for news has grown globally from 7% to 10%, adoption remains low in the UK (4%) and US (6%), partly due to low trust in AI-generated answers.

The report also highlights a sharp decline in news engagement, with global interest in news falling from 59% to 46% over five years, while trust in news has dropped to a record low of 37% globally and just 30% in the UK. News avoidance continues to rise, online news subscriptions have largely plateaued, and publishers are increasingly challenged by audiences consuming news through third-party platforms rather than directly through their websites and apps.

Interest in creator-led news content is growing, but the data suggests these creators are mostly complementing rather than replacing traditional news sources. Overall, the report points to a continued shift away from direct publisher relationships toward platform-driven news discovery, creating new challenges for audience growth, trust, and subscription revenue.

Fox Announces Plans To Acquire Roku For $22 Billion.

Fox has agreed to acquire Roku for $22 billion, giving it access to Roku's ad tech stack, DSP, and data from more than 100 million streaming households while combining ownership of two major free streaming platforms: The Roku Channel and Tubi. The deal significantly strengthens Fox's position in CTV advertising, though the company expects to keep The Roku Channel and Tubi as separate services to maximise audience reach across different viewer segments.

▸ Week 24

• - AI ads fuel another wave of MFA
• - Premium video becomes a subscription product
• - Samsung opens home screen ads programmatically
• - Publicis-LiveRamp deal raises neutrality questions
• - Publishers adopt AI bot-blocking whitelists
• - Publisher rights remain unclear after Google's AI ruling
• - Programmatic hardware race between SSPs

AI ‘girlfriend ads’ are fueling a new wave of MFA sites.

MFA websites are increasingly using AI-generated “girlfriend” ads and deepfake-style content to lure users into search arbitrage funnels filled with low-quality AI content and advertising, diverting traffic and revenue away from legitimate publishers. These schemes attracted over 2 million monthly visits in Q1 2026, with DoubleVerify estimating that individual networks can generate hundreds of thousands of dollars annually and potentially millions in global economic impact.

AI has made it easier for fraudsters to rapidly create highly engaging, manipulative ads and scale MFA operations, contributing to a sharp rise in AI-generated “slop” sites, which now exceed 220,000 domains globally. Advertisers and agencies are increasingly concerned about brand safety and wasted ad spend, prompting verification providers such as DoubleVerify and IAS to expand tools designed to identify and block AI-driven MFA fraud.

Media Briefing: Publishers put premium video behind the paywall to sell subscriptions.

Publishers including The Wall Street Journal, Fortune and Bloomberg are increasingly placing premium video content behind paywalls, treating video as a subscription product. The WSJ has seen strong early results from its subscriber-only video series, with several episodes ranking among its most effective video-driven subscription converters, while Fortune and Bloomberg are experimenting with gated livestreams, documentaries and exclusive video hubs to add value for paying members.

This shift reflects a broader strategy to reduce reliance on declining search traffic and third-party platforms by bringing audiences back to owned properties, while still using free clips on social channels to promote premium content. Although evidence that video directly drives new subscriptions remains limited, publishers and consultants see greater potential in subscriber retention, with users who engage across multiple formats such as articles, newsletters, podcasts and video being 10-20% less likely to cancel their subscriptions.

Home Screen Ads On Samsung TVs Will Soon Be Available Programmatically.

Samsung is making its premium TV home screen advertising inventory available programmatically, with global rollout beginning in Q3 through partners including The Trade Desk, Google and Magnite. Home screen ads have traditionally been sold directly because they are highly visible, attract strong engagement and carry greater brand safety risks than standard CTV ad placements.

To address these concerns, Samsung will use AI-powered screening, manual reviews and strict platform controls to prevent unsuitable ads from appearing on users’ TV home screens. The move reflects a broader industry shift toward making premium CTV inventory easier to buy programmatically while focusing on measurement, targeting and user experience rather than simply increasing ad supply.

Ad Tech Briefing: The crunch conversations at Cannes Lions now Publicis is buying LiveRamp.

Publicis Groupe’s planned acquisition of LiveRamp has raised concerns about whether LiveRamp can continue to operate neutrally. Rival agencies are assessing their dependence on LiveRamp and exploring alternative identity, clean-room and data collaboration solutions, although replacing its extensive ecosystem of integrations would be costly and complex.

Meanwhile, marketers are increasingly focused on data sovereignty, portability and reducing reliance on third-party infrastructure that could change ownership or strategic direction. The deal also creates an opportunity for challengers such as ID5 and Audiences, while reigniting a broader industry debate over who should control the infrastructure that powers audience targeting, measurement and data collaboration.

Reuters and Time adopt bot-blocking whitelists to rein in AI crawlers.

Publishers including Reuters and Time are now blocking all AI bots by default and only allowing approved bots through whitelists, aiming to regain control over how their content is accessed and used. While tools such as robots.txt are imperfect and often ignored by scrapers, publishers view them as a way to create friction, increase scraping costs and encourage AI companies to pursue licensing agreements instead of taking content freely.

The strategy also reduces infrastructure costs associated with serving large volumes of bot traffic and provides clearer visibility into unauthorised scraping activity. As AI-driven scraping grows, publishers are increasingly combining bot-blocking technology, licensing deals, legal protections and industry standards initiatives to protect content value and create fairer exchanges with AI companies.

Google’s AI opt-out leaves publishers with a choice they can’t safely use.

The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority has ordered Google to give publishers more control over how their content is used in AI search products, including the ability to opt out of AI Overviews, AI Mode and AI training, but many publishers argue the measures do not go far enough. The main concern is that publishers remain opted in by default and still lack AI-specific click data, making it difficult to assess whether participating in Google’s AI features helps or harms their traffic and revenue.

Many publishers fear opting out could reduce visibility and traffic, while staying in allows Google to continue using their content without providing clear evidence of value in return. As a result, the ruling is being viewed less as a decisive victory and more as the beginning of a broader debate over publisher rights, content ownership and Google’s growing influence over how information is discovered online.

Independent Ad Tech Is Reframing Itself Around Cloud Hardware.

A growing debate in ad tech is emerging around cloud infrastructure, with SSPs differentiating themselves based on whether they own and operate their own server infrastructure (“on-prem”) or rely on public cloud providers. Companies like PubMatic and Index Exchange argue that owning infrastructure reduces costs, enables faster AI development and allows DSPs to run custom bidding models directly within SSP environments.

Others, including Magnite, contend that public cloud infrastructure provides greater flexibility and scalability, particularly during major live events or traffic spikes. Despite the marketing around these approaches, industry leaders argue that both models can deliver similar capabilities, with the real difference often coming down to who bears the infrastructure costs.

▸ Week 23

• - Global publisher survey urges newsrooms to rethink AI and creator strategies
• - Publishers remain sceptical about Perplexity's trust and transparency efforts
• - UK publishers gain control over how Google uses content in AI features
• - The debate around publishers buying paid traffic continues
• - OpenAI says it will not share advertising revenue with publishers
• - Publishers model and mitigate a future with less Google search traffic
• - Industry coalition pushes for a simpler Digital Omnibus framework
  

Newsrooms Must Look Beyond Efficiencies and Risk Management in AI and Creator Strategies, Finds Global Publisher Survey.

A new global newsroom study found that while publishers see AI as important, adoption is being slowed by skills gaps, cultural resistance, and unclear use cases, with many leaders expecting AI to reduce newsroom headcount. The report argues that publishers should focus less on efficiency gains and more on using AI to enable journalism that was previously impossible, while doubling down on original reporting and audience relationships as key differentiators.

At the same time, newsrooms are making a major push into short-form video, podcasts, and creator-led content, with 79% planning to increase investment in short videos over the next year. However, many publishers are still approaching creator partnerships cautiously, prioritising brand safety over opportunities to reach niche communities and underserved audiences.

Media Briefing: Perplexity’s new ‘trust and transparency’ pitch does little to win over publishers.

Perplexity is trying to rebuild trust with publishers by promoting transparency, citations, and new partnership programmes, but ongoing copyright lawsuits from major publishers like CNN, The New York Times, and Dow Jones continue to fuel scepticism. Many publishers argue that proper attribution alone is not enough, as they are still not seeing meaningful licensing or referral revenue from AI answer engines.

Perplexity has introduced revenue-sharing models and a new "premium sources" licensing programme, while also positioning its AI tools as a way for publishers to generate commercial opportunities from editorial content. However, media executives remain unconvinced that these initiatives adequately compensate publishers or address past concerns about content scraping and AI-generated summaries replacing visits to publisher websites.

UK Publishers Gain Opt-Out From Google’s AI Features Following CMA Intervention.

The UK Competition and Markets Authority has ordered Google to let publishers opt out of having their content used in AI search features, AI training, and fine-tuning without losing visibility in Google Search, a move it describes as a world first. This addresses a major publisher complaint that they were effectively forced to allow AI scraping because opting out meant disappearing from search results altogether.

The new rules also require Google to provide clear attribution and links in AI-generated search results, while preventing the company from penalising publishers who choose to opt out. Although publishers welcome the added control and bargaining power, some industry groups argue that Google's nine-month implementation timeline is too slow and may not adequately address the traffic and revenue losses publishers are already experiencing.

The case for and against publishers buying paid traffic.

As search and referral traffic continues to decline, many publishers are increasingly using paid traffic as a way to acquire new audiences and offset losses, although doing so risks being labelled as MFA. The debate centres on the difference between legitimate audience growth and content promotion versus arbitrage, where cheap clicks are bought solely to generate more advertising revenue.

Publishers face significant uncertainty because even reputable sites experimenting with paid traffic can be flagged as MFA, particularly when engagement is low or ad loads become excessive. As AI-generated content increases the supply of "good enough" articles online, many industry experts argue that audience trust, loyalty, and genuine engagement will become the key factors separating premium publishers from arbitrage-driven competitors.

OpenAI not planning to share advertising revenue with publishers.

OpenAI says it has no plans to share advertising revenue with publishers when their content appears in ChatGPT responses, arguing that the main value it provides is visibility, engagement, and potential subscriptions rather than traffic or direct revenue. The company claims publisher traffic from ChatGPT may be lower than expected but is often higher quality, with users spending more time on sites and being more likely to subscribe.

Despite ongoing copyright lawsuits from publishers including The New York Times, OpenAI says discussions with the news industry are progressing and points to its growing number of licensing agreements with major media organisations. However, OpenAI acknowledged that most publishers are unlikely to secure licensing deals, as it is prioritising partnerships in key markets and with organisations willing to pursue broader strategic and technology collaborations.

How publishers are modeling – and mitigating – a future with significantly less Google search traffic.

Publishers are increasingly preparing for a "Google Zero" future where AI-powered search dramatically reduces referral traffic, with some already seeing Google search traffic decline by 30–60% over the past few years. In response, publishers are stress-testing their businesses against severe traffic losses and forecasting further declines as Google's AI Mode becomes more prominent in search results.

Rather than relying on pageviews, many are shifting towards direct audience relationships, subscriptions, newsletters, events, branded content, syndication partnerships, and B2B revenue streams. Across the industry, the emerging consensus is that publishers should diversify beyond search traffic and build stronger brands that can reach audiences across multiple platforms, whether they own those platforms or not.

Industry Coalition Calls for the Digital Omnibus to truly Deliver Simplification.

A coalition has urged EU policymakers to review proposed changes in the Digital Omnibus package, warning that Articles 88a and 88b could create legal uncertainty, technical complexity, and economic disruption across the digital ecosystem. While supporting the EU's goal of simplifying regulations and boosting competitiveness, they are calling for more impact assessments, stakeholder consultation, and technical evaluation before the measures move forward.

▸ Week 22

• - Publishers unlock new AI licensing revenue through Snowflake
• - Publishers seek growth through social media platforms
• - Email-based IDs face growing scrutiny in CTV
• - IAB Tech Lab releases guidance on managing AI bots
• - Omnicom pushes for more direct publisher relationships
• - Agencies prepare for the agentic era
• - Microsoft urges publishers not to block AI bots
• - Google's AI search expansion increases pressure on publishers

Publishers quietly cut ‘six-figure’ deals via Snowflake’s AI licensing platform.

Snowflake is helping publishers monetise their content by enabling enterprises to access licensed news and archive content through its AI platform, Cortex Knowledge Extensions, without exposing raw content or allowing it to be used for AI model training. Major publishers including The Washington Post, Associated Press and USA Today Network have joined the programme, with some reportedly securing six-figure licensing deals from enterprise customers.

Unlike some AI licensing marketplaces, Snowflake does not take a share of content licensing revenue, instead earning money from the infrastructure and computing resources used to run AI queries. The company is betting that growing demand for AI agents and trusted external data sources will create a scalable new revenue stream for publishers, although most see AI licensing as a useful supplement rather than a replacement for declining traffic and referral revenues.

Media Briefing: As Google traffic ebbs, some publishers see social platforms as real revenue lines.

Publishers are increasingly shifting their focus from driving traffic back to their own websites to monetising audiences directly on social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook, as Google search traffic and display ad revenues continue to decline. Companies such as People Inc. and Ziff Davis are reporting growth in off-platform revenue streams including sponsorships, social advertising, content licensing and branded content, helping offset losses from traditional web traffic.

Industry experts argue that today's strategy is more sustainable than the social-media-first approach of the 2010s because publishers have diversified revenue models and are monetising assets they own, such as first-party data, intellectual property and audience insights. However, publishers remain dependent on platforms they do not control, meaning algorithm changes, revenue-sharing arrangements and shifting platform priorities still pose significant long-term risks.

Why Critics Say Email-Based IDs Don’t Work For CTV.

Alternative ID vendors have spent years promoting email-based IDs for CTV advertising, but many buyers and publishers remain sceptical about their accuracy, transparency and suitability. Concerns have grown after a recent incident where incorrect UID2 encryption went unnoticed for months, raising broader questions about whether ID providers adequately validate the quality and legitimacy of the data behind their identifiers.

Critics also argue that many FAST channels and CTV publishers generate email-based IDs using third-party data brokers rather than true first-party user relationships, undermining the original privacy and consent-based value proposition of alternative IDs. While some advertisers report improved targeting and measurement using alt IDs, industry experts agree that stronger transparency, independent auditing and better reporting are needed before email-based identifiers can earn widespread trust in CTV.

IAB Tech Lab Releases Guidance On AI System Bot Management Strategies For Public Comment.

IAB Tech Lab has released new guidance for publishers and content owners on managing bots, crawlers and AI systems, and has opened the framework for public comment until June 2026. The guidance helps non-technical business leaders understand the different strategies available for controlling non-human traffic, along with the costs, benefits and trade-offs of each approach.

Industry participants argue that managing AI crawlers is becoming a critical business issue, as publishers need better ways to distinguish beneficial AI access from unwanted extraction of their content and intellectual property. The ultimate goal is to help publishers make more informed decisions, reduce operational risks, and create sustainable commercial relationships with AI companies while maintaining greater control over how their content is accessed and used.

Omnicom’s ‘fewer middlemen’ push is reaching publishers – just not their P&Ls.

Omnicom is increasingly encouraging its agencies to buy media more directly from publishers and reduce reliance on DSPs, SSPs and other intermediaries, as part of its broader strategy around supply path optimisation and agentic media buying. While publishers welcome the rhetoric, many remain sceptical that it will lead to meaningful shifts in advertising budgets, noting that most ad spend still flows to major platforms or agency-controlled ad tech stacks.

Omnicom argues that shorter supply chains improve efficiency, transparency, targeting accuracy and the share of media spend that reaches publishers, while also laying the groundwork for AI-powered media buying agents. For publishers and ad tech vendors alike, the message is clear: future success will depend less on acting as a middleman and more on demonstrating measurable value and performance.

Ad Tech Briefing: Agencies reposition for the agentic era.

Publicis’ proposed $2.2 billion acquisition of LiveRamp is being viewed as more than an identity or data deal. It reflects a broader trend where agencies want greater ownership and control over the infrastructure, data flows and governance systems that power modern advertising.

Discussions at Digiday's Programmatic Marketing Summit revealed growing frustration with opaque supply chains, walled gardens and fragmented programmatic ecosystems, leading buyers to favour more curated and direct supply paths. At the same time, agencies are increasingly developing their own AI tools and governance frameworks, signalling that the future battle in ad tech may be less about AI itself and more about who controls the systems that AI operates on.

Microsoft To Publishers: Don’t Block The AI Bots.

Microsoft is encouraging publishers and retailers to allow AI crawlers to access their content, arguing that blocking bots reduces visibility in AI-powered search, recommendation engines and agentic systems, potentially limiting future traffic and discovery opportunities. Microsoft is also expanding its content licensing marketplace, which allows publishers to earn revenue when their content is used to ground AI responses, creating a commercial model for AI-content partnerships.

However, some publishers, such as People Inc., advocate a more controlled approach: block AI crawlers by default, then selectively grant access through licensing agreements and permissions. The broader message is that publishers should proactively define their AI strategy rather than passively letting AI reshape the industry, balancing visibility, control and monetisation.

What Google’s expanded AI features mean for publishers.

Google’s new AI Search features, including AI Mode and agentic search assistants, are expected to further reduce publisher referral traffic by keeping users inside Google's ecosystem and enabling more zero-click experiences. SEO experts warn that these tools will continue shifting attention away from traditional search results, although some believe breaking news publishers will remain relatively protected because AI still relies on original reporting.

While Google insists AI Mode is optional and will continue sending traffic to websites, many publishers see the update as another step towards a future where discovery, answers and follow-up searches happen within Google rather than on publisher sites. The broader takeaway is that publishers relying heavily on search traffic face increasing pressure to diversify their audience and revenue strategies as AI becomes more deeply integrated into search.

▸ Week 21

• - Agentic advertising moves from experiments into real operational workflows
• - AI starts solving real operational and ad ops challenges for publishers
• - Publishers prepare for a zero-click future as AI search expands
• - Generative AI reshapes auctions and programmatic infrastructure
• - AppLovin faces privacy lawsuit over alleged user tracking
• - IAB Europe launches carbon.json emissions initiative
• - The Economist prepares content and workflows for AI agents
• - Publicis strengthens identity and AI infrastructure with LiveRamp

Future of Marketing Briefing: Agentic advertising is closer than you think and further than you hope.

AI-driven advertising workflows are rapidly moving from experimentation into real operational use, with autonomous agent-to-agent trading potentially scaling within the next 6–12 months. However, the industry still lacks the standards, governance models, and guardrails needed for fully autonomous decision-making.

Companies like Omnicom are already testing AI-powered campaign workflows, while publishers such as CNN and News UK are preparing their own sell-side agents. The next phase of programmatic may look less like traditional media buying and more like AI-driven infrastructure with shorter, more automated supply chains.

AI Is Finally Doing Real Work In Ad Ops (But Only When It Works With Your Existing Tech).

Publishers are starting to use AI for real operational tasks inside ad ops, including analysing revenue drops, comparing SSP discrepancies, and reviewing Prebid-related changes directly across GAM and other systems. According to examples shared at Programmatic AI Las Vegas, investigations that previously took weeks can now be completed within hours when AI is connected directly to publishers’ existing workflows and datasets.

However, AI still depends heavily on integrations, verification, and understanding each publisher’s unique setup and business logic. The biggest operational gains are currently coming from AI systems that can work directly across fragmented publisher workflows, datasets, SSP reporting, and monetisation infrastructure rather than operating as standalone chat tools.

Media Briefing: Publishers brace themselves for the zero-click era amid Google’s AI search overhaul.

Publishers are accepting that traditional Google search traffic may never fully return as AI-powered search experiences continue to reduce click-throughs to publisher sites. The shift further weakens the traditional page-view economy that many publishers previously depended on.

Many publishers are now focusing more heavily on direct audience relationships, newsletters, subscriptions, and AI visibility strategies as Google expands AI Overviews and conversational search experiences. Overall, publishers are preparing for a future in which discovery happens within AI interfaces rather than on publisher websites.

The Programmatic Auction Is Changing In Real Time – Here’s How.

Generative AI is rapidly reshaping how programmatic auctions operate across SSPs, DSPs, and publisher infrastructure. At the same time, fragmented supply chains continue to weaken signal quality, transparency, and operational efficiency across the ecosystem.

SSPs are using AI for traffic shaping, pricing optimisation, and supply-path management, while buyers focus more heavily on measurable outcomes and cleaner data flows. The industry is now trying to reduce operational complexity without losing the scale and automation programmatic originally enabled.

Lawsuit accuses U.S. ad tech giant AppLovin of tracking millions of Dutch people.

A Dutch privacy organisation has launched a major lawsuit against AppLovin, accusing the company of illegally tracking millions of users, including children, through mobile apps and games. The case highlights growing pressure around tracking, profiling, and data sharing within the mobile advertising ecosystem. The lawsuit also reflects broader European concerns around transparency, consent, and the handling of personal data in digital advertising.

IAB Europe Supports Comparable Digital Advertising Emissions Data with New carbon.json Voluntary Disclosure Specification, Now Open for Public Comment.

IAB Europe opened a public feedback period for carbon.json, a proposed specification designed to standardise emissions reporting across the digital advertising supply chain. The initiative aims to improve transparency and consistency in campaign- and supply-path-level emissions data across DSPs, SSPs, ad servers, and other ad tech infrastructure. Overall, sustainability and infrastructure transparency are becoming increasingly important themes in programmatic advertising.

The Economist prepares for a two-track internet: one for humans and one for AI agents.

The Economist is preparing for what it describes as a “two-track internet” — one version optimised for human readers and another designed for AI agents and answer engines. The publisher is testing agent-readable content, AI-optimised pages, and AI-powered workflows in response to the growth of AI-driven interfaces and answer engines.

‘Identity is the qualifier for AI’: Publicis’ $2.2 billion LiveRamp deal is a bet that whoever controls the data owns the AI era.

Publicis acquired LiveRamp in a major move focused on data, identity, and AI infrastructure. The company argues that competitive advantage in the AI era will come less from the AI models themselves and more from the proprietary data connected to them. The deal strengthens Publicis’ capabilities across identity, clean rooms, and cross-platform data collaboration through LiveRamp’s RampID infrastructure, which connects advertisers, publishers, retailers, and ad tech partners across the open web.

▸ Week 20

• - Agentic ad buying is already being actively used by brands and agencies
• - Future remains heavily reliant on Google as profit falls 67%
• - Platform-dependent publishing struggles as social and search traffic become unreliable
• - Netflix doubles down on AI in advertising
• - Mail Metro Media shifts toward PMPs, first-party data and fewer ads
• - PMC uncovers dark traffic to find new revenue
• - Different opinions emerge around agentic media buying
• - Brand and agency execs criticise opaque programmatic advertising
  

Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit May Recap: How marketers are navigating agentic ad buying.

Agentic ad buying isn’t a future concept, it’s already being actively used by brands and agencies, as highlighted at the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit May 2026. AI agents are now participating in media buying, optimisation, QA, and even deal negotiations, but they still require human oversight to avoid costly mistakes like incorrect CPMs or irrelevant outputs.

A major focus across the industry is setting guardrails, with brands enforcing rules like spending caps and mandatory human sign-off to keep AI under control. At the same time, AI is helping agencies unlock more value from data by acting as “second brains” that organise knowledge, simulate audiences, and improve decision-making.

However, increased automation is making transparency worse, with platforms like Google, Amazon, and DSP tools becoming more of a black box, raising concerns about control and media quality. Overall, AI won’t replace programmatic marketers yet, but it is reshaping their role into more of a systems architect, and those who can effectively use AI will have a clear advantage.

Future reveals it is still heavily reliant on Google as profit falls 67%.

Future plc still relies heavily on Google, with at least 60% of its revenue tied to brands dependent on Google-driven traffic. The company reported declining financials, with revenue down 8% and profit before tax dropping 67%, largely due to reduced audience traffic and weaker e-commerce performance.

Future is trying to shift toward more resilient “destination brands” and new revenue streams like AI visibility and direct advertising, but most of its portfolio is still in transition or heavily reliant on Google. While traffic is falling, the company argues revenue is becoming less tied to website visits, though it still expects overall revenue to decline slightly in 2026.

Media Briefing: BuzzFeed’s $120M sale marks another step in the repricing of digital media scale.

BuzzFeed’s majority sale at a fraction of its former valuation highlights how platform-dependent publishing has collapsed as social and search traffic become unreliable. The company has seen massive declines in revenue and audience, showing that publishers relying on algorithms rather than direct audience relationships now face serious long-term sustainability challenges.

AI Agents Are Coming to Netflix to Grow Its $3 Billion Ad Business.

Netflix is doubling down on AI in advertising, introducing tools that can automate media planning, creative adaptation, and even autonomous ad buying on its platform. At the same time, it is scaling aggressively with global expansion, programmatic capabilities, and growing inventory, positioning itself as a major, data-driven advertising player with revenue projected to hit $3 billion in 2026.

Mail Metro Media shifts ad strategy toward PMPs and fewer ads as it unifies stack.

Mail Metro Media is shifting its strategy toward PMPs, first-party data, and fewer ads per page to create a more performance-driven and premium advertising model. The move aims to offset declining open-market programmatic revenue by strengthening private deals and proving clearer outcomes to advertisers.

Internally, the company is restructuring its commercial operations and investing in programmatic expertise to drive significant PMP growth while maintaining strong direct relationships. Overall, it reflects a broader industry trend where publishers move away from commoditised open exchange toward controlled, data-rich environments that can better justify ad spend.

Penske Media Illuminates Dark Traffic To Find New Revenue.

Publishers are losing both traffic and visibility as users shift to AI answer engines and increasingly block tracking, creating large volumes of “dark traffic” that can’t be properly measured or monetised. Penske Media Corporation is tackling this by focusing on owned audiences like newsletters and subscriptions, which are more stable and less dependent on external platforms.

The company is also using modelling and tools like Ad-Shield to better estimate and recover this hidden audience, improving attribution and revenue potential. Ultimately, uncovering dark traffic is helping publishers realise that their direct channels may be more valuable than previously measured, strengthening their case to advertisers.

The case for and against agentic media buying.

Agentic media buying is being tested by companies like Omnicom and The Trade Desk, with some seeing it as a way to cut intermediaries, improve transparency, and push more value back to publishers. Supporters argue it could streamline the supply chain, favour premium inventory, and improve performance through automated, data-driven optimisation.

Critics, however, warn it may add even more opacity, enable “outcomes at any cost” behaviour, and reduce advertiser visibility into where ads run and how decisions are made. Overall, agentic buying is still early-stage and unproven, and while it may improve efficiency, it is unlikely to fix the deeper issues facing the open web and publisher monetisation.

‘Google doesn’t care that it’s terrible’: Brand, agency execs air frustrations with The Trade Desk, Google’s Performance Max, Meta’s Advantage+.

At the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit May 2026, brand and agency execs openly criticised how opaque programmatic advertising has become, with The Trade Desk called out for being technically transparent but overly complex to the point of eroding trust. Even more concerning, buyers see AI-driven platforms like Google’s Performance Max and Meta’s Advantage+ as true “black boxes,” offering less visibility, unexpected changes, and questionable performance.

Advertisers reported rising costs, hidden settings, poor inventory quality, and difficulty verifying where spend actually goes across multiple DSPs. Overall, the shift toward automation and AI is not improving transparency, and in many cases is making an already complex ecosystem harder to control and trust.

▸ Week 19

• - UID2 concerns raise doubts about data accuracy and real impact
• - OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads globally amid trust and privacy considerations
• - AI licensing emerges as new but uncertain publisher revenue stream
• - People Inc. restructures after major search traffic decline
• - IAB introduces new standards for emerging CTV ad formats
• - Google AI Max drives higher CPCs and search ad costs
• - ChatGPT Ads Manager opens to U.S. advertisers
• - Publishers expand into sports business content
• - Scraper economy emerges as major threat to publisher value

A Publisher Didn’t Get Its UID2 Setup Right. The Trade Desk Didn’t Notice. What Went Wrong?

Publishers are being pushed to adopt UID2 for CTV, but there are serious concerns about whether the data behind these IDs is accurate, consented, or even useful. A CTV publisher discovered its UID2 implementation was broken for months, yet The Trade Desk failed to detect the issue, raising doubts about its oversight as both DSP and UID2 administrator.

Even after fixing the error, the publisher saw no impact on revenue, suggesting UID2 may not actually influence demand in practice. Overall, the situation highlights weak validation, limited transparency, and a broader risk that alternative IDs create a false sense of precision in a messy, opaque ecosystem.

‘Expand thoughtfully’: OpenAI offers ChatGPT ads to new markets including the U.K., Brazil and Japan.

OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT ads globally, rolling out tests across major markets like the UK, Japan, and Brazil to scale advertiser demand and gather performance data. While early traction is strong, its growth depends on balancing effective targeting with user trust and privacy in a highly sensitive, conversational environment.

Media Briefing: Publishers cautiously count AI licensing as notable revenue amid programmatic strain, in Q1 earnings.

AI licensing is emerging as a meaningful new revenue stream for publishers, with deals involving companies like Meta starting to contribute in Q1 2026, though exact figures remain unclear. However, this revenue is unpredictable and not yet proven to offset ongoing declines in traffic-driven advertising.

Publishers continue to face pressure from reduced search traffic, partly driven by platforms like Google shifting user behaviour through features like AI Overviews. While AI deals offer short-term upside, most publishers see them as a supplement, not a replacement, and are still focused on diversifying revenue and rebuilding direct audience relationships.

People Inc. Looks Inward For Growth As Its Search Traffic Downsizes.

People Inc. is restructuring its business to reduce reliance on Google after losing around two-thirds of its search traffic, shifting focus toward owned audiences, syndication, and AI licensing deals. This strategy is already driving growth, with rising off-platform audiences and diversified revenue streams like affiliate commerce, licensing, and contextual ad tech.

At the same time, the company is doubling down on its strongest brands to expand into ecommerce and products, aiming to build revenue beyond ads and subscriptions. Despite progress, Google remains a major pressure point, and the company is betting on fresh content and new business models to stay competitive in the AI-driven media landscape.

IAB Tech Lab Introduces Standardized Signals For CTV Ad Portfolio For Public Comment.

IAB Tech Lab has introduced updates to standardise how new CTV ad formats like pause and menu ads are signalled programmatically, aiming to reduce manual processes and improve transaction clarity. These standards are designed to make buying and selling CTV inventory more scalable and efficient, unlocking new monetisation opportunities and accelerating growth in the streaming ad ecosystem.

‘CPC pain is real’: One year on, Google’s AI Max has pushed up search budgets – and costs.

Google’s AI Max is driving higher search ad spend and rising CPCs, as automation expands targeting beyond keywords into broader intent-based auctions and increases competition. While it can boost reach and conversions, many brands are also spending more to offset declining organic traffic and adapt to a more automated, AI-driven search landscape.

OpenAI opens up ChatGPT ads manager to the U.S. while promising third-party measurement, CPA bidding.

OpenAI is expanding its ads platform by opening a self-serve manager to all U.S. advertisers, lowering entry barriers, and developing key features like third-party measurement and CPA bidding. While the stack is evolving toward full performance advertising, OpenAI is tightly controlling ad delivery and data to protect user experience, even if that limits transparency and optimisation for advertisers.

Why news publishers are getting into the sports business coverage.

Yahoo and The Wall Street Journal are launching sports business content hubs to tap into growing interest in the financial side of sports and attract a high-value, professionally relevant audience. These verticals aim to combine analysis, aggregation, and partnerships to capture fragmented audiences and create new advertising opportunities beyond traditional sports coverage.

From ad tech tax to AI data brokers: the new middlemen keep 100%, publishers say.

Publishers see third-party scraping by AI companies as a far bigger threat than the ad tech tax, since it extracts 100% of their content value without compensation and can even fuel competing products. This growing “scraper economy,” involving dozens of vendors, often relies on evasive or deceptive practices that bypass publishers’ attempts to block access.

Despite being a billion-dollar market, publishers earn nothing from it and struggle to enforce control, especially when content is redistributed across partner platforms. The situation is increasingly compared to the early days of Napster, where value was stripped at scale before any fair marketplace or compensation model emerged.

▸ Week 18

• - Omnicom tests AI agents to cut out ad tech intermediaries
• - Google, Meta and Amazon dominate UK ad spend
• - Publishers rewire sales teams around outcomes
• - IAB Europe introduces new CTV transparency framework
• - WPP signals shrinking role of the open internet
• - IAB Tech Lab updates OpenRTB with live content signals
• - Australia moves to tax Meta over publisher payments
• - Brands deploy AI agents inside publisher chatbots

That is an objective’: Omnicom tests AI agents to cut out the ad tech middlemen. 

Omnicom has begun using AI agents to autonomously buy media directly from publishers, reducing reliance on traditional ad tech intermediaries that take a cut of ad spend. The move signals a serious push by holding companies to shorten the programmatic supply chain and gain more control over data, relationships, and margins.

Powered by its Acxiom data business, Omnicom aims to make these direct buys more effective through stronger first-party data and targeting. While this could benefit publishers through more direct spend, it may also concentrate budgets among a smaller group, accelerating the decline of the open web. 

Google, Meta and Amazon took two thirds of £46bn UK 2025 adspend.

Google, Meta, and Amazon captured roughly two-thirds (£31bn) of the UK’s £46.7bn ad spend in 2025, with most growth flowing to them. Google dominated with about £21.5bn, followed by Meta (£6.5bn) and Amazon (£3bn), while publisher ad revenues declined across print and digital.

The shift highlights how platforms continue to consolidate power, driven by growth in social media, search, and retail media advertising. As a result, publishers are under pressure to diversify revenue streams and push for stronger regulation to rebalance the market.

Media Briefing: Publishers rewire sales teams for the outcomes era.

Sales teams at publishers are shifting away from traditional selling toward outcome-driven models focused on performance, partnerships, and full-funnel solutions. The structure has flipped, with a majority of teams now made up of client success, strategy, and support roles rather than pure sellers, improving campaign performance and client retention.

Publishers like USA Today Co., The Wall Street Journal, and Hearst are reorganising teams into specialised pods, integrating pre- and post-sales roles, and expanding capabilities like custom content and events. AI is accelerating this shift by automating manual tasks, enabling faster insights, and pushing sales roles to focus more on relationships, strategy, and high-value client interactions. 

IAB Europe Tackles CTV Transparency and Measurement Consistency with New Framework, Now Open for Public Comment.

IAB Europe has released its CTV Measurement Framework and Transparency Principles for public consultation, aiming to improve transparency and measurement standards in a fast-growing but opaque channel. Despite strong CTV growth, many advertisers and publishers still lack visibility into ad placements, quality verification, and brand suitability, highlighting the need for consistent industry standards.

Developed with major stakeholders like Amazon Ads, Google, and YouTube, the framework introduces unified metrics across media and performance to improve accountability. The initiative is now open for industry feedback until 12 June, with the goal of building greater trust and consistency across the CTV ecosystem. 

WPP CFO says The Trade Desk operates in a smaller slice of the ad market.

WPP signalled a shift away from reliance on DSPs like The Trade Desk, emphasising transparency and client-specific media buying while framing the open internet as a shrinking part of ad spend. As budgets move toward walled gardens like Amazon and YouTube, holdcos are tightening control over supply paths and increasingly favouring direct, outcome-driven buying over traditional programmatic auctions.

IAB Tech Lab Announces New OpenRTB Attributes Including Live Content For Public Comment.

IAB Tech Lab has introduced new OpenRTB updates for public comment, adding standardised signals to better describe live, real-time, and first-broadcast content, along with improved pricing transparency through updated macros. These changes aim to help buyers and sellers make more informed decisions in fast-growing areas like CTV and live events, where timing and pricing clarity directly impact value.

Australia to tax Meta if it doesn’t pay news publishers.

Australia is proposing a 2.25% revenue levy on tech giants like Google and Meta to fund journalism, though companies can avoid it by striking commercial deals with publishers. The policy aims to fix gaps in the existing bargaining code, but while publishers support it as essential for sustaining news, tech platforms argue it unfairly forces payments and misrepresents how the ad market works.

Brands Can Now Deploy Their Own Agents Inside Publisher Chatbots.

AI shopping agents are gaining traction, and Dappier has introduced “Sponsored Conversations,” allowing brands to insert custom AI agents directly into chat experiences on publisher sites. This format helps advertisers explain complex products more effectively while giving users a more interactive, real-time way to research.

Publishers benefit from increased engagement and a new monetisation stream, with chatbots keeping users on-site longer and integrating smoothly into existing programmatic setups. Early results show strong performance, with brands like Miku seeing more qualified leads and higher user intent through these AI-driven interactions.

▸ Week 17

• - AAMP 2.0 brings agentic buying and selling closer to real-world execution
• - ChatGPT expands ad inventory by showing ads to logged-out users
• - Publishers use AI to unify fragmented cross-platform audience data
• - New industry council aims to improve transparency in programmatic supply chains
• - UK publishers challenge Google’s AI use of content and demand more control
• - OpenDirect emerges as a foundation for agentic direct-sold advertising
• - DSP infrastructure evolves with containerised, model-driven bidding capabilities
• - Publishers shift from page views to engagement in a zero-click environment

AAMP 2.0 Release Brings Transaction-ready Buyer and Seller Agent SDKs. 

AAMP 2.0 marks the shift from experimental frameworks to production-ready Buyer and Seller Agent SDKs that can autonomously negotiate, transact, and operate within existing industry standards. These agents communicate using shared schemas and standards like OpenRTB, OpenDirect, and AdCOM, with full logging and auditability to keep humans in control.

The Buyer Agent introduces multi-agent orchestration, enabling automated media planning, deal negotiation, and campaign execution, supported by features like a centralised Deals Library and campaign automation. The Seller Agent focuses on intelligent supply-side management, with dynamic media kits, automated negotiation and pricing, and a state engine that governs deal lifecycles and ensures transparency.

Both SDKs are production-ready, highly scalable, and integrate with existing ad tech ecosystems, supporting real-world deployment across cloud and on-prem environments. Additionally, AAMP 2.0 introduces Agentic Audiences via OpenRTB and Prebid, enabling embedding-based targeting and signalling, with further advancements already planned for AAMP 3.0. 

ChatGPT Ads Have Begun Showing Up For Logged-Out Users.

Advertisers are keen to spend on ChatGPT ads due to their high-intent environment, but limited inventory and low ad frequency have made it hard to scale campaigns. OpenAI has responded by expanding ads to logged-out users, increasing available inventory without formally announcing the rollout.

Early feedback suggests ads are subtle and well-integrated into conversations, maintaining user trust while being easy to overlook. Despite improved delivery potential, the channel still struggles to absorb larger budgets, making scale the main bottleneck for advertisers.

Trusted Media Brands Gets An AI Assist To Sell Cross-Platform Audiences.

Publishers still need to present a unified view of audience reach and performance, but fragmented data across channels makes this increasingly complex. Companies like Trusted Media Brands are using AI to analyse scattered data, uncover patterns, and turn performance insights into clear, sellable narratives for.

AI helps speed up tasks like RFP responses, media planning, and reporting, while first-party data is used to identify high-intent audiences rather than just maximising scale. As a result, publishers are shifting from selling the biggest reach to highlighting more engaged audiences, balancing scale with quality in a fragmented media landscape. 

IAB Tech Lab Launches Industry Council to Address Transparency in $200B U.S. Programmatic Ad Market.

IAB Tech Lab has launched the Programmatic Governance Council to improve transparency, alignment, and standards across the programmatic ecosystem. The council brings together major buyers, publishers, and platforms to address issues like auction transparency and signal consistency, aiming to deliver clearer governance frameworks and more trustworthy programmatic operations.

UK publishers urge CMA to curb Google as search giant claims AI does them no harm.

Publishers are pushing back on Google’s claim that AI fine-tuning poses no harm, arguing it uses their content to create competing products and reduces traffic to their sites. They warn that increased reliance on fine-tuning could replace real-time content access (RAG), weakening licensing opportunities and keeping users within Google’s ecosystem.

Industry groups are calling for granular opt-out controls, fair compensation, and clearer separation between training, grounding, and fine-tuning uses of their content. They are also urging regulators to act faster on payment frameworks and transparency requirements, highlighting ongoing concerns about imbalance in power and revenue loss.

The Contract Layer for Agentic Advertising.

OpenDirect is critical for agentic direct-sold advertising because it provides a structured, machine-readable standard that ensures campaigns are executed with clear, shared state and no ambiguity. Unlike programmatic auctions, direct-sold campaigns require precise commitments, and without a standard like OpenDirect, AI agents risk costly errors due to misinterpreting campaign details.

By using explicit schemas, state machines, and APIs, OpenDirect removes reliance on natural language and enables reliable, auditable communication between buyer and seller agents. AgenticDirect builds on this by adding AI-friendly capabilities like tool discoverability and agent-to-agent communication, making the system more suitable for autonomous workflows.

However, gaps remain, including limited support for structured negotiation, real-time updates, and deeper taxonomy integration. Overall, OpenDirect is positioned as the necessary foundation for scaling agent-driven direct advertising, with further development needed to fully support AI-native execution.

Bedrock Debuts Containerized DSP Deployment on Index Cloud, Enabling Model-Driven Bidding at Scale. 

Bedrock Platform has launched a containerised DSP running on Index Exchange’s infrastructure, allowing bidders to operate closer to impressions for more efficient and scalable programmatic buying. This approach reduces infrastructure costs, removes scale limitations, and enables AI models to evaluate more impressions in real time, improving performance and competitiveness across the open internet.

This reflects a broader shift toward treating AI as a new audience, particularly in retrieval-based models where content is accessed in real time. Premium value will come from unique, fresh, trusted, and paywalled content, while commoditised SEO-style content may lose relevance in this new ecosystem. 

From page views to propensity: How the Daily Mail is retooling for a zero-click world. 

DMG Media is shifting from a page-view-driven model to prioritising engagement metrics like time spent, repeat visits, and deeper user interaction as traffic declines due to AI and zero-click search. The publisher is investing in loyalty-focused products such as AI-driven paywalls, games, vertical content hubs, and app personalisation to turn casual visitors into habitual users and subscribers.

At the same time, it is reducing ad clutter, strengthening its direct audience base, and restructuring its tech and domain strategy to support a more sustainable, subscription-led business. Overall, the strategy reflects a broader industry shift from scale to quality, focusing on owned audiences and repeat engagement rather than relying on external traffic sources.

▸ Week 16

• - AI-powered answer engines drive higher engagement and ad performance for publishers
• - OpenAI builds conversion tracking to measure ChatGPT ad performance
• - Multicultural publishers turn to first-party data as RFPs shrink
• - Amazon brings Dynamic Traffic Engine to improve bidstream efficiency
• - Google platform changes continue to impact publisher revenue at The Sun
• - Forbes expands into commerce and memberships to offset traffic decline
• - Publishers explore monetising AI bot traffic as a new revenue stream
• - Leadership changes and partner tensions raise questions around The Trade Desk
• - Hearst launches unified marketplace to simplify omnichannel news buying
• - Google tests updated AdSense partner selection for better transparency
  

AI answer engine drives more effective advertising at Reach and Independent.

Taboola’s AI search tool “Deeper Dive” is seeing unusually high engagement, with up to one in six users on participating publisher sites using it and around 7 million monthly users overall. The feature provides chatbot-style answers with links to publisher content and generates revenue through ads, which are outperforming traditional ad placements in conversion rates.

Early results show stronger reader engagement and monetisation, with users more likely to continue browsing and interact with content. Taboola sees this as a fast-growing opportunity and plans to evolve it into more advanced, agent-like AI, while positioning it as a publisher-friendly alternative to platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

OpenAI builds tool to track whether ChatGPT ads convert.

OpenAI is building a conversion tracking pixel to measure whether ads in ChatGPT lead to actions like purchases or sign-ups, signalling a move into performance advertising. This would close the loop between ad exposure and outcomes, similar to tools used by Google and Meta, but without the mature attribution ecosystem those platforms rely on.

For now, advertisers are mainly testing with small budgets, and broader adoption will depend on whether ChatGPT proves to drive high-intent user behaviour. The bigger challenge is attribution in a non-linear, conversational environment, especially as privacy changes and signal loss continue to weaken traditional tracking methods. 

As RFPs Shrink, Multicultural Publishers Fight For Dollars With First-Party Data.

Multicultural publishers are struggling with declining reach due to reduced referral traffic and inconsistent ad spend, making it harder to compete for shrinking RFP budgets. To adapt, many are using tools like AdGrid’s Audience Accelerator to extend their first-party data beyond owned platforms into channels like CTV and digital audio.

This helps them scale audiences, improve targeting, and meet advertiser demands for more measurable, lower-funnel outcomes. However, challenges remain around ad tech fees, maintaining brand authenticity, and proving value in an increasingly competitive and selective market. 

Amazon Ads Hands The IAB Tech Lab A Tool That Promises To Waste Fewer Bid Requests.

The IAB Tech Lab is open-sourcing Amazon’s Dynamic Traffic Engine (DTE), a tool designed to improve real-time bidding by helping SSPs send more relevant ad inventory to DSPs. It works as a real-time feedback loop where buyers signal their preferences and sellers filter traffic accordingly, reducing wasted bid requests and improving performance.

The system includes cloud-based rules, an evaluator on the sell side, and filtering logic to optimise which impressions get sent to auction.  Overall, DTE aims to cut infrastructure costs, improve efficiency, and even reduce environmental impact by eliminating unnecessary bid traffic.

Google changes hit revenue at The Sun as losses grow to £53m.

Revenue at News Group Newspapers, publisher of The Sun, fell 8% to £273.1m, partly due to reduced traffic and ad revenue linked to platform changes like Google, while pre-tax losses widened significantly to £53.3m. The decline was further driven by rising one-off legal costs and settlements related to past unlawful newsgathering activities, including high-profile claims.

Forbes creates wine vertical, commerce shop and membership business as AI squeezes traffic.

Forbes is launching a wine-focused content vertical, commerce site, and membership program to diversify revenue and reduce reliance on declining traffic, which dropped 37% year over year in Q1 2026. The strategy reflects a broader shift toward monetising smaller but higher-intent audiences through direct consumer revenue like subscriptions, memberships, and affiliate commerce.

The new offering will include curated wine shipments, exclusive content, events, and a commerce platform, leveraging Forbes’ brand and editorial authority rather than purely acting as a retailer. While this approach can boost engagement and conversions, questions remain around its long-term scalability and the cost of acquiring and retaining subscribers.

Publishers urged to embrace future where bot readers provide majority of revenue.

AI bots and agents are rapidly becoming a significant share of publisher traffic and are expected to become a primary revenue source, shifting focus from human audiences to “autonomous visitors.” Instead of blocking bots, companies like Tollbit argue publishers should monetise them through microtransactions and licensed access, especially as scraping is difficult to prevent.

This reflects a broader shift toward treating AI as a new audience, particularly in retrieval-based models where content is accessed in real time. Premium value will come from unique, fresh, trusted, and paywalled content, while commoditised SEO-style content may lose relevance in this new ecosystem. 

Ad Tech Briefing: The Trade Desk’s ‘changing of the guard’ and a ‘sign of the times’.

The Trade Desk is undergoing a wave of executive departures, including its comms chief, amid broader leadership changes described as a “changing of the guard.” These shifts come alongside strained relationships with major partners like Omnicom and Publicis Groupe, as well as a declining stock price, raising questions about the company’s future direction.

Hearst Built A Unified Ad Marketplace To Simplify Omnichannel News Buys.

Hearst is launching a unified programmatic marketplace that combines inventory from its TV, newspaper, and digital properties to simplify buying and improve transparency for advertisers. The move addresses fragmented supply and aims to give buyers a clearer, more efficient way to access high-quality local news audiences across channels.

By consolidating supply paths and leveraging first-party data, Hearst is trying to regain control over how its inventory is packaged and sold while improving targeting. The initiative comes as publishers face declining traffic, signal loss, and growing competition from walled gardens, positioning Hearst News as a more transparent alternative in national media plans.

Google AdSense Will Experiment With New Ad Technology Partners.

Google plans to test an updated list of commonly used ad tech partners in AdSense starting April 20, 2026, with a potential full rollout from June 5, 2026 if results benefit publishers. The update will reflect globally relevant partners based on programmatic demand data and privacy standards, while giving publishers the option to opt out or customise their partner list.

▸ Week 15

• - OpenAI launches self-serve ads manager for advertisers
• - IAB Europe updates supply chain transparency guidance
• - Third-party scrapers create a growing threat for publishers
• - Arc XP helps publishers monetise AI bot traffic
• - Petri Kokkonen to co-lead IAB Europe programmatic group
• - PMG integrates AAMP standards into Alli operating system
• - Disney and Mediaocean introduce Prisma Direct for CTV buying
• - Google tests AdSense privacy updates in two phases
• - Ozone simulates how publisher content appears in AI answers
• - Keyword blocking continues to impact publisher revenue
• - CNN builds in-house infrastructure for AI-driven media trading

OpenAI has quietly launched its ads manager as it races to build out its ads business.

OpenAI is testing a self-serve ads manager, similar to Google Ads, allowing a small group of advertisers to monitor and optimise campaigns in real time without intermediaries. The pilot has lowered entry from $200K - $250K to $50K, with CPMs around $60, and includes partnerships with ad tech platforms like Criteo as it expands access.

IAB Europe’s Supply Chain Transparency Guidance - Questions for Partners.

IAB Europe has released an updated version of its supply chain transparency guidance, aimed at improving visibility and accountability across the programmatic ecosystem. The framework covers key areas such as data, costs, inventory sources and sustainability, providing practical questions for each stakeholder group to support better decision-making across the supply chain.

Media Briefing: Another AI threat emerges for publishers: the third-party scraper.

A growing “black market” for AI content licensing has emerged, where smaller tech companies scrape publisher content without permission and resell it to larger firms, leaving publishers uncompensated. These scrapers are difficult to block, often bypass robots.txt, and can even access paywalled content, while demand for high-quality data to train AI models continues to surge.

Dozens of vendors and major companies, including IBM, Salesforce, and Amazon Web Services, are involved in buying and using this data for various purposes. AI scraping activity is rapidly increasing, with reports showing ~24% quarterly growth, intensifying concerns among publishers about lost revenue and lack of control over their content.

The Washington Post’s Arc XP adds TollBit to help publishers make money from AI bot traffic.

The Washington Post’s Arc XP has integrated with TollBit to help publishers block, monitor, and monetise AI bot traffic by charging for content access through a marketplace. The move addresses rapidly growing bot traffic and gives especially mid-sized publishers a new revenue stream without heavy engineering, with some already earning from hundreds to tens of thousands per month.

Petri Kokkonen Appointed Co-Lead of IAB Europe’s Programmatic Working Group.

Petri Kokkonen (CEO, Relevant Digital) has been appointed co-lead of the IAB Europe Programmatic Working Group alongside Ralf Ollig, representing IAB Finland and bringing over 20 years of programmatic experience. The group focuses on shaping standards, improving transparency, and addressing key topics like auction mechanics, sell-side decisioning, and emerging channels across the European digital advertising ecosystem.

PMG Integrates IAB Tech Lab AAMP Standards Into Alli Operating System.

IAB Tech Lab announced that PMG has integrated its Alli operating system with the AAMP Buyer Agent framework and Agent Registry, enabling standardised, AI-driven agentic media buying. This allows teams to deploy specialised AI agents for different clients and channels while improving interoperability with external partners and platforms.

The integration helps automate routine workflows, increase efficiency, and shift focus toward strategic decision-making in media buying. It also signals broader industry momentum toward adopting open standards for scalable, transparent agent-based advertising systems.

Ad Tech Briefing: Disney and Mediaocean sound the death knell for the I/O.

The Walt Disney Company and Mediaocean are launching Prisma Direct, an API-driven workflow layer that enables agencies and brands to execute direct CTV and streaming ad buys through a single interface. The tool automates traditionally manual processes like planning, trafficking, and billing, removing the need for insertion orders and consolidating workflows into one system.

It aims to reduce operational inefficiencies and supply chain complexity while giving buyers access to premium inventory and helping publishers minimise revenue leakage. While it streamlines execution, core ad tech functions like decisioning, measurement, and DSP-based buying remain unchanged, positioning Prisma as an orchestration layer rather than a replacement for existing systems.

Google Tests AdSense Privacy Updates In Two Phases.

Google is rolling out a two-phase update to Google AdSense starting April 20 and continuing into June, changing how ad tech partners are managed and how consent is handled in the EEA, UK, and Switzerland. The update introduces a Google-managed “commonly used” partner list alongside custom options, giving publishers more control over which vendors can serve and measure ads under GDPR.

These partner lists act as a compliance and monetisation gatekeeper, directly impacting consent signals and revenue potential. While focused on Europe, the changes signal broader global shifts in partner management, with similar but region-specific controls already in place in the US under state privacy laws.

Ozone’s platform tries to simulate how publisher content appears in AI answers.

Ozone is developing a simulation platform within Ozone Labs that shows publishers how their content is processed, structured, and cited in AI answer engines, helping them optimise visibility and understand LLM behaviour. The tool aims to reduce information asymmetry around AI usage of content, though early publisher feedback suggests limited referral traffic from these platforms is still holding back major investment.

Keyword Blocking Demonetized More Than Half Of Reuters’ Brand-Safe Stories.

Outdated keyword blocklists are still widely used by advertisers, but a study by Integral Ad Science and Reuters found they wrongly flag a large share of brand-safe content, with over 50% of suitable news pages affected. This blunt approach blocks valuable inventory and audiences, even on low-risk or lifestyle content, due to lack of contextual understanding.

As a result, publishers lose significant ad revenue and advertisers miss high-quality, engaged audiences. More advanced contextual targeting tools exist, but adoption remains inconsistent, and keyword blocking continues to impact monetisation across the industry.

CNN builds in-house agent infrastructure as it prepares for AI-driven media trading.

CNN is building an agentic advertising infrastructure with plans to begin media trading via AI agents by Q1 2027, starting with testing protocols, LLM interpretation, and buyer behaviour throughout 2026. The initiative focuses on standardising agent-to-agent communication with partners and aligning with IAB Tech Lab to enable efficient, automated transactions between buy- and sell-side systems.

▸ Week 14

• - Publishers Debate AI Licensing Value and GEO Monetisation Potential
• - How Publisher Revenue Models Are Shifting in 2026
• - OpenPath Delivers Growth but Highlights Transparency and Volatility Challenges
• - Local Publishers Hit by AI Traffic Loss Turn to Collaboration and Direct Strategies
• - Localism and Immersive Media Emerging as Key Advertising Growth Drivers
• - Criteo Expands with Self-Serve GO to Capture SMB Advertisers
• - CIMM Challenges Programmatic by Arguing That Media Quality Is Undervalued
• - The Washington Post Shifts to Creator-Led Video to Diversify Revenue
  

Media Briefing: Publishers debate the value of AI licensing and GEO.

AI was a central topic at the Digiday Publishing Summit, where publishers highlighted that AI driven search is reducing referral traffic while generating minimal direct traffic or revenue in return. Executives debated AI licensing deals, with some viewing them as essential for content protection and legal leverage, while others remained sceptical about their near term revenue potential.

Many publishers are testing smaller, low effort partnerships and applying strict guardrails around control, attribution, and content usage before committing to larger agreements. At the same time, publishers are exploring GEO related opportunities, including optimising content for AI visibility and packaging these capabilities into commercial offerings, despite limited immediate monetisation impact.

Digiday+ Research: How Dow Jones, Forbes, The Guardian and other publisher revenue streams are shifting in 2026.

Publishers are navigating economic pressure and AI driven shifts by diversifying revenue across ads, events and subscriptions, while adapting to zero click search impacts. According to Digiday research, direct sold ads, branded content and programmatic remain core revenue drivers, with events growing significantly and overtaking subscriptions in importance.

Revenue strategies are becoming more integrated, with publishers aligning ads, subscriptions, commerce and events around first party audience relationships to maximise lifetime value. Subscriptions continue to grow in absolute terms but are losing relative importance, while ad revenue is still expected to contribute the majority share for most publishers through 2027.

Emerging channels like newsletters, podcasts and video are gaining traction, often supporting broader commercial strategies and offering new monetisation opportunities. At the same time, AI driven zero click search is pressuring affiliate commerce and referral traffic, pushing publishers to experiment with GEO, audience modelling and AI powered workflows despite mixed effectiveness so far.

Publishers see double digit growth from The Trade Desk’s OpenPath, but volatility remains.

Publishers report that revenue and CPMs from The Trade Desk’s OpenPath have largely held up, with some seeing double digit growth and testing OpenAds to capitalise on temporary advantages like duplicate bid opportunities. OpenAds is being adopted partly due to these short term gains, even as duplication challenges and supply path dynamics remain complex.

Tools like PubDesk are improving visibility into performance metrics, but publishers still struggle to fully understand revenue fluctuations and underlying drivers. Overall, while performance has been positive, limited transparency and a sometimes strained relationship with the DSP continue to be key concerns for publishers.

Local Publishers Hit By AI Traffic Drops Collaborate For Revenue Relief.

AI-driven zero-click search and platform dynamics are significantly reducing referral traffic for local publishers, with reported declines of 25% to 50%, directly impacting ad and subscription revenue.

In response, publishers are shifting toward collaboration, shared infrastructure, and direct audience strategies such as newsletters, events and video to reduce dependency on external platforms and regain control over monetisation.

IAB UK updates Futurescape, spotlighting localism and immersive media as key growth drivers to 2030 and beyond.

In its updated Futurescape report, IAB UK identifies localised media strategies and immersive experiences as key forces shaping advertising by 2030, driven by shifts toward hyperlocal relevance and participatory engagement models.

The study highlights that brands will need to move away from broad targeting and invest early in immersive technologies and contextual approaches to remain competitive as consumer expectations evolve.

Ad Tech Briefing: Criteo makes self serve push with GO, targeting SMB growth.

Criteo has launched full self service capabilities for GO, using AI to automate cross channel campaign setup, optimisation and budget allocation across formats. The move is designed to attract small and mid sized advertisers and positions Criteo more directly against platforms like Google and Amazon.

While the platform simplifies campaign management and reduces operational complexity, it offers less control over media buying compared to traditional DSPs. Its success will depend on broader adoption beyond retargeting and its ability to differentiate in a market increasingly dominated by automated, outcome based buying solutions.

CIMM Is Out To Prove That All Media Isn’t Equal.

The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement argues that programmatic advertising undervalues media quality by prioritising audience targeting and short-term outcomes over the context and effectiveness of the media itself. Its upcoming paper proposes a new framework that separates media, creative and audience quality, emphasising factors like attention and contextual relevance using probabilistic, non-binary measurement approaches.

The report also challenges industry reliance on deterministic signals and highlights inefficiencies such as mispriced CTV inventory and wasted spend on low-quality placements. It concludes that improving media quality measurement requires buy-side adoption and a shift toward balancing short-term performance with long-term brand impact.

After newsroom cuts, The Washington Post turns to creator led video deals.

The Washington Post has launched creator-led video series where creators retain IP ownership, reducing production costs while opening new revenue streams through brand sponsorships. The initiative reflects a broader shift toward creator partnerships to reach new audiences and diversify monetisation, while maintaining editorial oversight and quality control. 

▸ Week 13

• - The Trade Desk dispute raises questions about transparency and control in programmatic
• - The Guardian US reports strong programmatic growth through higher CPMs
• - Publishers at Digiday’s summit focus on traffic decline and revenue diversification
• - US judge dismisses local publishers’ monopoly claim against Google
• - IAB Tech Lab pushes to make agentic AI more practical for advertising
• - PubMatic bets AI agents can simplify media buying
• - European broadcasters call for regulation of CTV operating systems
• - News/Media Alliance launches collective AI licensing model for smaller publishers

Future of Marketing Briefing: A cynic’s guide to the most transparent dispute in programmatic history

Three major agency holding companies – WPP, Dentsu, and Publicis Groupe – have recently distanced themselves from or audited The Trade Desk, citing concerns around fee transparency, while the DSP disputes these claims and points to confidentiality constraints. Despite this, the financial exposure appears limited, as a significant portion of The Trade Desk’s revenue comes from direct advertiser contracts that agencies have limited control over.

Industry observers suggest the conflict is less about fees and more about control over advertiser relationships, as platforms like The Trade Desk increasingly bypass traditional agency structures. The situation highlights broader tensions in the programmatic ecosystem, where transparency arguments are often intertwined with competitive positioning across the supply chain.

Higher Programmatic CPMs Drove 44% Revenue Growth for The Guardian US

The Guardian US reported a 44% YoY increase in programmatic revenue in February, driven by higher CPMs rather than traffic growth. The uplift came from a combination of stronger pricing in both open auctions and private marketplace deals, supported by a shift toward real-time, data-driven optimisation of programmatic performance.

The publisher has also repositioned its inventory as “signal-rich” and trusted, focusing on curated PMP packages, contextual data and clearer supply paths to improve buyer outcomes. This reflects a broader market shift where some advertisers are prioritising quality, transparency and performance over low-cost reach, though questions remain about how scalable this approach is across the wider ecosystem.

Media Briefing: Overheard at the Digiday Publishing Summit, March 2026 edition

At the Digiday Publishing Summit, publishing executives highlighted ongoing declines in search-driven traffic, which are putting pressure on both advertising and subscription revenues. Many publishers are accelerating efforts to build subscription and membership models, but face challenges in converting users, retraining teams, and competing with established players like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

At the same time, publishers are exploring off-platform strategies, including monetisation through social platforms, where engagement and paid follower models can sometimes outperform on-site conversions. Overall, the discussions reflect an industry-wide shift toward diversified revenue streams, though uncertainty remains around the scalability of subscriptions and reliance on volatile platform ecosystems.

US judge dismisses Google monopoly claim brought by local publishers

A US federal judge dismissed an antitrust lawsuit brought by two news publishers against Google, ruling they failed to prove harm or establish monopoly power in the online news market. The court rejected claims that Google’s traffic share equates to dominance in news, calling the publishers’ market share calculations unreliable and overly broad.

Publishers argued that Google’s use of news content in features like AI Overviews reduces referral traffic and creates an unfair dependency, but the judge found these claims insufficient to support antitrust violations. The ruling underscores ongoing tensions between publishers and platforms over traffic, monetisation and AI usage, while highlighting the legal challenges of defining market power in the evolving search ecosystem.

Ad Tech Briefing: IAB Tech Lab accelerates push to make agentic AI more practical

IAB Tech Lab has introduced Agentic Advertising Management Protocols (AAMP) and partnered with Kochava to integrate an open-source AI workflow environment into StationOne, aiming to standardise agentic media buying, measurement and compliance.

The initiative comes amid growing fragmentation in agentic advertising approaches, as vendors race to define standards and tools, raising concerns about interoperability and operational complexity for already resource-constrained teams.

PubMatic Is Betting AI Agents Will Finally Fix Programmatic's Complexity Problem

PubMatic has partnered with Untapped Growth to deploy AI-driven media buying through its AgenticOS infrastructure, aiming to automate campaign planning, execution and optimisation. The system uses specialised AI agents to replace manual workflows and potentially bypass traditional DSP layers, allowing agencies to execute campaigns via simplified, prompt-based inputs.

Early tests suggest significant efficiency gains, including reduced setup time and lower buy-side costs, while offering smaller agencies access to capabilities typically associated with larger holding groups. However, it remains uncertain whether agentic systems will fully replace existing programmatic workflows or simply reshape how orchestration and control are distributed across the supply chain.

European Broadcasters Call for Regulation of CTV Operating System “Gatekeepers”

Major European TV groups including the European Broadcasting Union, egta, and ACT are urging the EU to extend the Digital Markets Act to cover CTV operating systems. They argue that a small number of CTV OS providers are gaining gatekeeper-like control over content distribution, audience access and monetisation, potentially impacting competition and interoperability.

The request targets large platforms such as Android TV, Amazon Fire OS and Tizen, though the focus is on applying existing gatekeeper criteria rather than naming specific companies. If designated as gatekeepers, these platforms could face new obligations around fairness, data sharing and restrictions on self-preferencing within their ecosystems.

News/Media Alliance signs AI licensing deal to unlock recurring RAG revenue for small and mid-sized publishers

News/Media Alliance has partnered with Bria to offer its 2,200 publisher members a collective licensing model that enables monetisation of content used in enterprise AI and RAG-driven applications. Publishers can opt in to license selected content and receive revenue based on usage by enterprise AI systems, with proceeds split 50-50 under Bria’s attribution model.

The initiative aims to create scalable access to AI licensing opportunities, particularly for smaller publishers that lack the leverage to negotiate directly with major tech platforms like Google or Microsoft. It reflects growing enterprise demand for reliable, licensed data in AI workflows and positions collective deals as a practical route to building recurring revenue streams from AI usage.

▸ Week 12

• - Publishers begin testing sell-side agents
• - Google gives publishers an AI Overview opt-out
• - Breaking news gets a boost from Google Discover
• - Butler/Till reports strong results from agentic media buying
• - Future uses publisher first-party data to train AI
• - Publicis advises clients to avoid The Trade Desk
• - The ad tech industry is rethinking its foundations

What Does A Beta Test Of A Sell-Side Agent Look Like?

Publishers are beginning to explore agentic AI, where LLM-powered sales agents can make auction decisions and help sell inventory directly to buy-side systems. Early industry collaboration, including Prebid’s open framework, is enabling testing, with initial use cases focused on automating smaller, highly customised deals that are typically inefficient for human sales teams.

Early implementations from companies like The Weather Company and Optable show agents assisting with inventory discovery, audience packaging, proposal creation, and even deal setup, while still keeping human oversight in place. Although still in early stages, sell-side agents could evolve into a new transactional layer across both direct and programmatic channels, improving efficiency and enabling more intent-driven buying and selling.

Google Agrees to Give Publishers an AI Overview Opt-Out, but Concerns Remain

The UK’s CMA has proposed giving publishers more control over how Google uses their content in AI features, including the ability to opt out of AI Overviews and model training, and Google has agreed in principle to introduce such controls. While this appears positive, publishers and industry groups argue that the effectiveness will depend heavily on implementation details, particularly around transparency and enforceability.

Key concerns include the need for separate AI crawlers, granular opt-in or opt-out controls for different AI use cases, and safeguards to prevent indirect data access via third parties. Overall, the outcome could shift bargaining power toward publishers, but only if controls are sufficiently precise, enforceable, and aligned with consent principles.

US publishers see traffic boost for breaking news from Google Discover

Google AI Overviews have significantly impacted publisher traffic, with organic search referrals to a group of US publishers down 42% since 2024, while breaking news, particularly via Google Discover, is driving most remaining growth. Evergreen content such as explainers and reviews has been hit hardest, pushing publishers to prioritise timely, original journalism over SEO-driven content strategies.

Data also shows a broader shift in traffic sources, with declines in search partially offset by increases in direct, internal, and dark social traffic, though smaller publishers are disproportionately affected. While AI-driven referrals and citations are growing, they remain a minor share of traffic, reinforcing the need for publishers to diversify audience strategies beyond traditional search.

Butler/Till’s first agentic media buying tests cut media and supply chain costs

A first real-world test of agentic media buying by Butler/Till and PubMatic showed strong results, including an 82% reduction in supply chain costs, 30% lower CPMs, and increased impressions without compromising inventory quality. The setup used AI agents to translate campaign briefs, source inventory, and execute buys with human oversight, demonstrating both efficiency gains and faster campaign setup times.

These early tests suggest agentic systems could streamline programmatic workflows, reduce reliance on intermediaries like DSPs, and improve cost efficiency across the supply chain. However, the model is still in early stages, with implications for existing ad tech roles, as future value will likely depend on transparency, quality, and differentiated services rather than position in the supply chain.

Future Is Training Its AI On Publisher First-Party Data

Publishers are increasingly leveraging first-party data as a key asset in the AI-driven advertising landscape, with Future launching its Helix platform to combine audience data, predictive modelling, and campaign optimisation. The solution enables advertisers to identify high-performing audiences, activate them via direct and programmatic deals, and optimise toward outcomes like CTR and ROAS, while maintaining human-led planning and direct relationships.

Early tests show performance improvements, and the platform is designed to integrate with existing buying workflows and support future agentic buying systems. Overall, this reflects a broader shift where publishers use proprietary data and AI capabilities to differentiate, drive performance, and capture more advertiser demand.

Publicis Advises Clients to Avoid The Trade Desk, According to a Leaked Memo

Publicis has advised clients to avoid The Trade Desk after an independent audit found issues with fee transparency, including improperly applied DSP fees and insufficient evidence that media and data costs were passed through without markups.

The Trade Desk disputes the findings, citing data confidentiality constraints, but the dispute highlights ongoing tensions around transparency, fees, and trust in the programmatic supply chain.

Ad Tech Briefing: The industry is rethinking its foundations as a new world order is established

The ad industry is entering a major AI-driven transition, with agentic systems and LLMs expected to reshape media buying, monetisation models, and consumer behaviour, though the exact outcomes remain uncertain.

While advertising is seen as the likely core revenue model for AI platforms, the shift may favour performance-based models, increased automation, and potential consolidation, with broader implications for the balance between open web ecosystems and walled gardens.

▸ Week 11

• - The Telegraph’s subscribers drive revenue.
• - Meta hikes ad prices.
• - OpenX adds attention targeting for CTV ads.
• - New AI licensing scheme for smaller publishers.
• - MCP “Universal Adapter” for AI in advertising.
• - ShowHeroes acquired Traffective.

Media Briefing: In the AI era, subscribers are the real prize — and the Telegraph proves it.

Axel Springer acquired The Telegraph for £575 million, gaining a publisher with 1.09 million paid subscribers, 842,000 of whom are digital-only. The Telegraph generates around 81% of its core revenue from readers through subscriptions and circulation, compared with 19% from advertising.

Digital subscription revenue reached £81.1 million in 2024, while digital advertising generated £20 million, with total turnover of £279.4 million. Analysts highlight that subscription-based publishers benefit from direct audience relationships, recurring revenue, and first-party data, particularly as referral traffic from platforms and search becomes less predictable.

Meta Hikes Ad Prices

Meta will introduce additional fees for advertisers to offset Digital Service Taxes and other location-based charges in certain markets where ads are delivered, regardless of the advertiser’s location.

Starting 1 July, advertisers running image or video ads in Austria, France, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the UK will see a separate invoice line item adding roughly 2% to 5% to ad costs, depending on the country’s digital tax rate.

Future of TV Briefing: OpenX adds attention targeting for CTV ads backed by TVision.

OpenX has launched a new targeting option that allows advertisers to serve CTV ads to audiences more likely to be actively looking at the screen, available through its OpenXSelect curation tool as a paid add-on.

The feature uses TVision panel data to measure viewer attention and curates inventory by excluding programming with attention scores below 40%, enabling advertisers to prioritise higher-attention environments.

New AI licensing scheme to help smaller publishers strike deals with platforms.

Publishers’ Licensing Services (PLS) has launched a collective licensing initiative in the UK that allows publishers to license their content to AI companies for model training and retrieval-augmented generation in exchange for fees. The scheme invites publishers across sectors to opt in and contribute content to a shared repository that AI companies can access through licensed agreements.

The initiative aims to give smaller publishers access to AI licensing opportunities and provide legal certainty for AI companies seeking reliable, high-quality content sources. The project is being developed with support from industry groups and is positioned as a framework to help publishers monetise their content as AI usage expands.

Understanding MCP, The ‘Universal Adapter’ For AI In Advertising.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open specification developed by Anthropic that enables AI models to connect with external software and data sources in a standardised way. It allows AI systems to perform multi-step workflows across different platforms by defining which tools they can use and how those actions interact with data.

In advertising and marketing technology, MCP can help AI operate across complex stacks of DSPs, SSPs, analytics tools and internal systems rather than being limited to a single platform. Early implementations in companies such as Criteo, Similarweb, Adverity and MadConnect show MCP being used to connect data, manage workflows and maintain context across AI-driven campaign tasks.

ShowHeroes Boosts German Publisher Network and Programmatic Capabilities with Traffective Acquisition.

ShowHeroes has acquired German programmatic monetisation platform Traffective to expand its capabilities across CTV, video and display advertising, creating a combined platform working with nearly 2,000 publishers and delivering more than 25 billion monthly ad impressions.

The deal combines ShowHeroes’ contextual and video technology with Traffective’s yield management and monetisation tools, aiming to support publishers across multi-screen environments including web, video and CTV.

▸ Week 10

• - Meta says LLMs have not yet reached its core ads business
• - Programmatic ads become the internet’s biggest malware vector
• - Amazon audiences coming to Netflix through Amazon DSP
• - IAB Europe highlights AI, regulation and sustainability priorities
• - Creator-led media companies reshape the video ad model
• - Falling Google Discover traffic hits Reach’s digital revenue
• - The Trade Desk launches OpenTTD integration portal
• - Criteo joins OpenAI’s ChatGPT advertising pilot
• - Onetag acquires Aryel to expand immersive ad tech

Meta’s Ad Business Isn’t Powered by LLMs Yet

Meta’s CFO, Susan Li, said that large language models are not yet meaningfully used in the company’s core ranking and recommendation systems, despite their long-term potential. Today’s algorithms still rely on engagement signals like likes and watch time, while LLMs are mainly used for content understanding and more advanced ranking on Threads.

The main barrier to wider adoption is infrastructure, as running LLMs at Meta’s massive scale requires far more compute capacity than currently available. For now, Meta’s profits continue to be driven by incremental improvements to its existing ranking systems, which fund ongoing LLM research for the future.

Online Ads Are Now Top Malware Vector

Malicious advertising became the main channel for distributing malware in 2025, overtaking email scams and direct hacks. A report by The Media Trust found that programmatic advertising accounted for over 60% of malware and phishing campaigns, with incidents increasing 45% YoY.

The growth of AI-generated ads, new programmatic channels like CTV, and the complex ad tech supply chain have made it easier for cybercriminals to spread malicious ads and hide their tracks. Experts say advertisers, regulators, and consumers all need to play a role in improving online ad safety and reducing digital crime.

Amazon Audiences Are Coming To Netflix

Amazon Ads will allow US advertisers to use Amazon Audiences for targeting Netflix ads through the Amazon DSP starting next quarter. This follows Netflix opening its ad inventory programmatically in Amazon’s DSP, enabling advertisers to combine Amazon’s shopping and behavioural data with Netflix streaming impressions.

The move is part of Amazon’s push to prove that streaming ads can drive measurable performance, not just reach. By linking ad exposure to purchase data through its identity graph, Amazon aims to show advertisers clearer connections between streaming campaigns and real-world sales.

IAB Europe Releases 2026 State of Readiness Report

IAB Europe’s 2026 State of Readiness – Sustainability in Digital Advertising report examines how the European ad industry is progressing on both environmental and social sustainability. For the first time, the study evaluates not only environmental impact, such as carbon emissions, but also social factors, including privacy, accessibility, diversity, media plurality, and responsible media.

The survey, conducted with 135 organisations across Europe, found that social issues like privacy and media plurality rank as more materially important than environmental concerns. AI-related challenges are now the top ecosystem issue, cited by 56% of respondents, while concerns about ad fraud have also risen significantly.

Regulation has become the main driver of sustainability initiatives, surpassing corporate social responsibility, while employer reputation is emerging as a key motivator for action. Although environmental measurement is improving, reporting readiness remains uneven, with about one-third of companies still not planning to publish sustainability reports.

Content Creators Rebuilt The Video Ad Model

Creator-led video companies on platforms like YouTube and TikTok are building ad businesses that outperform traditional publisher video models by offering integrated, platform-native campaigns. Donut Media is an example, combining long-form YouTube content with custom host-read ads, short-form social content, podcasts, events and merchandise to create 360-degree brand partnerships.

Instead of relying on generic ad formats, brands become recurring elements within the content ecosystem, similar to sponsorships in sports. This approach turns video ads into premium, creator-driven integrations that drive stronger engagement and trust with audiences.

Google Discover Traffic Fall Affects Reach’s Revenue

Reach increased profits in 2025 despite declining revenue by cutting costs, including reducing headcount and operating expenses. Page views dropped sharply in the second half of the year, largely due to a 46% fall in Google Discover traffic, which had previously been a major referral source.

To adapt, the publisher is focusing on diversifying traffic sources through social platforms, off-platform distribution, video content and new subscription products. While print still generates most of Reach’s revenue, the company expects long-term digital growth to come from subscriptions, video monetisation and alternative audience channels.

The Trade Desk Welcomes OpenTTD

The Trade Desk has launched OpenTTD, a new portal that provides a single login and unified analytics for partners and advertisers using multiple services across its platform. The tool aims to simplify workflows and give companies deeper insights into data, audience segments and campaign performance to better demonstrate value and monetisation opportunities.

Criteo Named First Partner to ChatGPT’s Ad Pilot

Criteo has become the first ad tech partner integrated into OpenAI’s U.S. advertising pilot in ChatGPT, allowing brands to use Criteo’s commerce data and activation tools within the platform. The integration enables LLMs to access structured commerce signals such as product relevance and retailer performance to support product recommendations and advertising inside conversational AI.

Onetag Acquires Aryel for Immersive Ad Tech

Onetag has acquired immersive advertising company Aryel to integrate its interactive ad formats into Onetag’s global exchange platform. The combined platform brings together premium publisher inventory, immersive creative formats and AI-driven campaign optimisation within a single self-serve system used by more than 2,000 publishers and 5,000 advertisers globally.

▸ Week 9

• - PubMatic Positions Agentic AI as Core Growth Strategy
• - Publishers Seek Clarity on Google’s Preferred Sources
• - UK Publishers Unite on AI Usage Rights
• - Netflix Ad Platform Raises Double Spend Concerns
• - The Trade Desk Ventura OS Expands Into CTV
• - IAB Europe Calls for Risk-Based Regulation
• - Election Season Curation Focuses on Voter Values
  

A PubMatic Is All In On Agentic AI.

PubMatic reported $80 million in Q4 2025 revenue (–6% YoY) and $282.9 million for the full year (–3% YoY), though results exceeded company projections. Executives attributed revenue pressure partly to reduced spend from a large incumbent DSP and noted that performance stabilised later in the year. The company is also expanding its DSP base and direct-to-buyer business to offset concentration risk.

At the same time, PubMatic is positioning AgenticOS and agentic AI as central to its long-term strategy. The company predicts that 25% of digital advertising will be executed autonomously by 2028 and 50% by 2030. More than 250 agentic campaigns have already run on the platform, and PubMatic is charging additional fees for AgenticOS beyond its standard SSP take rate while accelerating adoption through a dedicated AI partner program.

Media Briefing: Without transparency, publishers can’t tell if Google’s Preferred Sources feature benefits them.

Google’s Preferred Sources feature is designed to highlight selected publishers across Google surfaces, but publishers say they lack clarity on how selection works and how much impact the program has on traffic or revenue performance. Several publishers report difficulty measuring whether inclusion translates into meaningful business outcomes.

The concerns reflect broader questions around platform transparency and control in AI-driven and algorithmic discovery environments. Without clear reporting metrics or visibility into ranking logic, publishers say it remains challenging to evaluate the commercial value of participation.

UK media groups unite to tackle AI ‘scraping’ of journalism.

Five major UK media groups — including the BBC, Financial Times and Sky News — have launched the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights coalition to address how journalistic content is used in AI systems. The group argues that publisher material is being scraped and reused without common standards for permission or compensation.

The coalition aims to establish shared technical standards and licensing frameworks that would allow AI developers to access journalism under clearer usage rules. Publishers participating in the initiative seek to retain control over how their content is used while ensuring fair value when it contributes to AI training or outputs.

Future of TV Briefing: Netflix’s in-house ad platform launch has led some advertisers to double spend.

Following the rollout of its proprietary ad platform, some advertisers report double-spending when campaigns run through both Netflix’s direct buying system and broader programmatic channels.  The development underscores growing operational complexity as major streaming platforms build their own ad tech stacks, creating new challenges in coordination, frequency control and budget management across CTV environments.

The Trade Desk’s Ventura OS Makes an Ecosystem Pivot.

The Trade Desk introduced Ventura OS as part of a broader strategy to embed its technology more deeply within the connected TV ecosystem. The initiative extends beyond traditional DSP functionality, positioning the company closer to the operating system and device layer. By integrating buying and data capabilities directly into CTV environments, Ventura OS expands The Trade Desk’s role within programmatic infrastructure and reflects shifting dynamics across the CTV supply chain.

IAB Europe Welcomes Digital Omnibus Ambition and Calls for Risk-Based Simplification.

IAB Europe welcomed the European Commission’s Digital Omnibus initiative and called for a more proportionate, risk-based approach to simplifying digital regulatory frameworks. The organisation argues that compliance obligations should better reflect actual risk levels while maintaining consumer protections.

According to IAB Europe, regulatory simplification would help reduce administrative burden and fragmentation across the European digital ecosystem, supporting innovation and competitiveness within digital advertising markets.

This Election Season, Buyers Can Curate Deals Based On Voter Values.

During the current election cycle, buyers are increasingly curating programmatic deals based on voter values and political alignment. Using contextual signals, audience segmentation and geographic targeting, advertisers aim to align messaging with specific ideological or issue-based audience groups across digital and CTV inventory.

The shift reflects broader adoption of sell-side curation in political advertising, where campaigns seek greater control over placement, brand suitability and audience alignment.  As election spending increases, curated supply is becoming a more structured part of campaign planning rather than opportunistic peak-season buying.

▸ Week 8

• - Publishers monetise AI visibility expertise
• - IAB Tech Lab launches LEAP live event forecasting API
• - Star Tribune strengthens brand safety strategy
• - Subscriptions grow despite traffic decline
• - Google expands AI licensing deals with publishers
  

Media Briefing: Publishers explore selling AI visibility know-how to brands.

Publishers are turning their own generative engine optimisation (GEO) expertise into a new revenue stream by helping brands improve their visibility and citations inside AI tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews. Instead of using GEO only defensively to protect their own traffic, publishers are now packaging prompt optimisation, structured data strategies, and editorial best practices into paid services and branded content offerings.

This shift reflects a major change in digital discovery, where being cited in AI-generated answers is becoming as important as traditional search traffic and links. Early results show commercial potential, with publishers like Future driving significant increases in AI citations for brand campaigns, signalling GEO could become a standard part of publisher monetisation strategies.

IAB Tech Lab Opens Public Comment on Live Event Ad Playbook (LEAP) Forecasting API to Enable Advance Discovery of Live Event Inventory.

The IAB Tech Lab has released a new Forecasting API that allows publishers and broadcasters to share structured data about upcoming live events, including schedules, expected ad breaks, and viewership forecasts. This helps make future inventory visible to buyers earlier, enabling better planning, automated deal creation, and more effective monetisation of premium live content.

The API addresses a major gap in programmatic, where future live inventory is difficult to discover and reserve, by standardising how this information is shared across DSPs, exchanges, and ad tech platforms. For publishers, this creates a clearer path to maximise revenue from high-value live events by making inventory easier to package, forecast, and sell programmatically in advance.

How The Minnesota Star Tribune Protects Advertisers While Covering ICE Crackdowns.

Despite traffic surging during major news coverage, the Minnesota Star Tribune proactively paused ads on sensitive articles to protect advertiser brand safety, which temporarily reduced direct ad revenue. Its diversified revenue mix, including large national advertisers, programmatic demand, and a strong agency services business, helped offset losses and maintain overall revenue growth.

The publisher also achieved high advertiser retention by emphasising its mission of funding local journalism and maintaining strong client relationships. To balance monetisation with editorial integrity, the Star Tribune is investing in AI-driven sentiment analysis and human oversight to enable more precise brand safety controls and preserve advertiser confidence around hard news content.

In Graphic Detail: Subscriptions are rising at big news publishers – even as traffic shrinks.

Subscription growth continues among major publishers like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian, but the focus has shifted from acquiring new subscribers to retaining them, increasing prices, and moving users to higher-value bundles. Publishers are boosting ARPU by expanding bundled products such as newsletters, games, videos, and premium verticals, with bundled subscribers showing higher engagement, retention, and lifetime value.

Subscription pricing rose about 5% year over year in 2025, with some publishers implementing significant increases and shortening promotional offers to improve revenue quality. Subscriptions are now the most important revenue stream for publishers, ahead of display and native advertising, as traffic from search and social becomes more volatile.

However, growth is uneven, with the top publishers seeing subscriber volumes increase by up to 77% while median publishers remain mostly flat, highlighting the importance of strong product ecosystems and brand strength. Overall, subscriptions are becoming the core stabilising revenue model for publishers, helping offset declining referral traffic and reducing dependence on advertising and platform-driven audience fluctuations.

Google promises ‘more focused deals’ with news publishers as FT joins AI pilot. 

▸ Week 7

• - Amazon joins the Prebid auction as publishers test incremental yield
• - Amazon and Microsoft build AI marketplaces for licensed content
• - UK publishers prioritise video as ESG slips down the agenda
• - AI licensing and protection measures fail to curb web scraping
• - CTV identity matching shows high error rates
• - European publishers file antitrust complaint against Google’s AI offerings
• - Publishers turn to AI-driven measurement to unlock blocked news inventory
• - Pressure mounts on Google’s ad dominance amid political scrutiny
• - IAB TCF v2.3 compliance deadline approaches
  

How Publishers Are Testing Amazon’s Prebid Adapter For Incremental Yield.

Amazon opened a beta version of its Prebid adapter on January 21, allowing Amazon demand to bid directly inside Prebid alongside other buyers using the same audience signals, identity solutions such as LiveRamp, and floor-pricing logic. This folds Amazon’s previously separate auctions, including TAM and UAM, into the same bidding process publishers already use, reducing the need to manage parallel JavaScript libraries and auction logic.

Publishers such as Raptive and Unwind Media are testing the adapter by comparing Amazon’s bidding behaviour inside Prebid versus its standalone setup, tracking bid submission, win rates and revenue contribution, while gaining direct visibility into how Amazon bids interact with floors, signals and overall auction dynamics.

Media Briefing: Turning scraped content into paid assets — Amazon and Microsoft build AI marketplaces.

Amazon is preparing to launch an AI content marketplace, positioning it alongside Microsoft as publishers gain new channels to license content to AI model developers. Amazon Web Services previewed the concept to publishers ahead of its February symposium, though details remain limited beyond a supply-and-demand model between publishers and AI companies.

Microsoft has already piloted its marketplace with publishers including Business Insider, Vox Media, USA Today, The Associated Press, Hearst Magazines and Condé Nast, adding Yahoo as a buy-side partner that licenses rights-cleared content and shares revenue on a CPM basis. Other infrastructure players such as Cloudflare are also developing AI licensing systems, acquiring Human Native to help convert publisher content into AI-ready, licensable data.

Video Up, ESG Down on UK Digital Publisher Priorities for 2026.

UK digital publishers are prioritising subscriptions and video as key revenue growth areas, with 45% of respondents citing each in the latest survey from the Association of Online Publishers, as concerns grow around traffic loss and AI summaries. The findings align with research from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which shows most publishers plan to increase video output and encourage journalists to build individual social media presences alongside publisher brands.

Sentiment around AI’s impact on publisher business models has turned more negative, with average scores falling to 4.7 out of 10, while a rising share of publishers are investing in IP protection against LLMs trained on their content. On the advertising side, publishers expect ad revenue to remain critical but increasingly forecast growth from private marketplaces rather than open auctions, alongside broader efforts to diversify revenue beyond advertising alone.

In Graphic Detail: AI licensing deals, protection measures aren’t slowing web scraping.

AI-powered search is driving significant traffic declines for publishers, with surveys showing that more than half have seen decreases and citing AI-driven search and social platform changes as top industry challenges. Data indicates that AI Overviews and chatbots send substantially less traffic than traditional search, while content scraping by AI systems is increasing.

Most publishers are not yet optimising for generative or answer engine optimisation, and those who do face limited transparency due to a lack of shared AI search data from platforms. In response, publishers are exploring AI licensing partnerships with companies including Microsoft and OpenAI, alongside emerging standards aimed at compensation, attribution and rights management.

Future of TV Briefing: CTV identity matches are usually wrong.

IP addresses are widely used as an identity signal in CTV advertising, but analysis from Truthset shows they produce high error rates across identity matching, including 84% for IP-to-email and 87% for IP-to-mailing address matches, based on data from providers such as Experian and Epsilon. Truthset estimates that around 40% of open-market CTV ad spend in the U.S. is wasted, driven by unreliable IP-based household matching that is further degraded by ISP practices like IP bundling.

European Publishers File Antitrust Complaint Against Google’s AI Offerings.

The European Publishers Council has filed a complaint accusing Google of abusing its dominance by using publishers’ content in AI Overviews and AI Mode without meaningful consent, opt-out mechanisms or fair remuneration, while diverting traffic away from publisher sites. Google disputes the claims, but regulatory scrutiny is increasing, with investigations underway and proposed measures aimed at giving publishers greater control over how their content is used in AI products.

Ad Tech Briefing: Publishers are turning to AI-powered mathmen, but can it trump political machinations?

Advertisers’ pullback from news advertising has largely been driven by keyword blocklists and conservative suitability thresholds that have redirected budgets toward walled gardens operating under different measurement standards. Publishers and ad tech firms argue that these systems have systematically over-blocked news inventory, leading companies like Hearst to adopt contextual and sentiment-based measurement to reassess inventory previously classified as unsafe.

Both challengers and incumbents, including DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science, are shifting toward more nuanced suitability frameworks that distinguish genuine risk from routine reporting, coinciding with broader IAB-led measurement reforms and a stronger focus on ROI rather than sentiment alone.

In Graphic Detail: The scale of the challenge facing publishers, politicians eager to damage Google’s adland dominance.

Alphabet reported $403 billion in 2025 revenue, including nearly $114 billion in Q4, underscoring continued growth even as regulatory and legal pressure on Google intensifies in the U.S. and EU. At the same time, industry dissatisfaction with current ad measurement systems is growing, with an IAB survey finding no buyers believe all paid channels are properly represented in existing marketing mix models.

Buyers estimate AI-driven improvements to measurement could unlock $26.3 billion in incremental media investment and $6.2 billion in productivity gains, prompting initiatives like Project Eidos to rethink cross-channel measurement frameworks. Despite these efforts and ongoing antitrust cases, Google’s ad business continues to expand, with total quarterly ad revenue exceeding $82 billion and growth in search and YouTube offsetting declines in its Google Network division.

IAB TCF v2.3 compliance deadline approaches.

The TCF v2.3 aims to resolve signalling ambiguity around whether vendors were disclosed in CMP user interfaces by making the disclosedVendors segment mandatory. Transition deadline is 28 February 2026. The update requires CMPs and vendors to support and act on the disclosedVendors segment to determine lawful data processing under Legitimate Interest and Special Purposes, while most publishers using commercial CMPs are not expected to be impacted by the change.

▸ Week 6

• - Publishers Get Q4 Breathing Room as Revenue Diversifies Beyond Search
• - Hearst Loosens Brand Safety to Unlock News Ad Yield
• - People Inc Cuts Reliance on Google Through Off-Platform Growth
• - Amazon Launches MCP Server for Agent-Driven Advertising
• - Publisher Lawsuits Against Google’s Ad Tech Continue to Mount
• - Microsoft Builds AI Content Licensing Marketplace for Publishers
• - Interactive Advertising Bureau Proposes Draft Rules to Curb AI Content Scraping
  
• - UK Publishers Join Forces on Shared Programmatic Ad Platform
  
  

Media Briefing: A solid Q4 gives publishers breathing room as they build revenue beyond search.

AQ4 2025 brought a rebound in digital ad revenue for many publishers, driven by improved economic stability and renewed advertiser confidence, with momentum extending into early 2026 forecasts. At the same time, traffic erosion, softer open-web programmatic performance, lower ad requests and CPMs, and the impact of AI-driven discovery shifts continued to pressure search-dependent revenue.

Several large publishers reported stronger growth in non-session-based revenue such as events, video, social, direct deals, subscriptions and licensing, while session-based and programmatic revenue lagged behind. Advertiser behaviour also showed signs of stabilising, with more predictable planning cycles and increased upfront commitments compared to the stop-start patterns seen earlier in 2025.

Hearst rethinks brand safety to unlock news ad yield.

Hearst is changing how it applies brand safety and suitability across its local news and TV inventory, partnering with Mobian to use context-based measurement instead of blunt keyword blocking, while still working with legacy vendors like DV and IAS. Hearst and Mobian say 38% of Hearst newspaper impressions are misclassified as unsafe by existing tools, suppressing demand and increasing costs for advertisers, despite data showing over 97% of TV impressions ran in safe environments.

The new approach assesses context, sentiment and audience personas, aiming to better align news content with buyer objectives and potentially reduce CPMs by up to 27% by easing bid pressure. This shift comes amid broader industry debate over whether current brand-safety frameworks systematically disadvantage news publishers, with growing advertiser openness to testing alternative measurement approaches

People Inc. Says Who Needs Google?

People Inc. reported losing around 50% of its Google search traffic over the past two years, with search now accounting for roughly 30% of traffic versus 70% five years ago, contributing to a 13% YoY decline in core sessions in Q4. Despite this, digital revenue grew 14% YoY in Q4 to $355 million, driven by off-platform distribution across apps, social platforms and Apple News, where off-platform views rose 43% YoY and non-session revenue grew 37% to 38% of total digital revenue.

Performance marketing revenue increased 17% YoY, supported by continued on-site demand and momentum from People Inc.’s contextual targeting platform D/Cipher, which now contributes to off-platform revenue and has expanded to third-party publishers via D/Cipher+. Looking ahead, the company expects further growth from non-session revenue streams while absorbing ongoing declines in Google referral traffic, even as print revenue and overall IAC revenues remain under pressure.

Ad Tech Briefing: Amazon launches MCP server for agent-driven advertising.

Amazon has launched its MCP Server in open beta, opening Amazon Ads’ APIs to AI agents and allowing natural-language prompts to be translated into structured ad operations without custom integrations. The setup lets agents on platforms like ChatGPT or Claude create campaigns, pull reports and manage billing through a single standards-based connection.

Beyond basic access, Amazon is packaging common advertising workflows such as campaign launches, geographic expansion and reporting into end-to-end tools that agents can execute automatically. The move places Amazon at the centre of the wider industry debate over agentic advertising standards, contrasting its Amazon-anchored approach with more open, cross-platform initiatives like AdCP.

A running list of publisher lawsuits targeting Google’s ad tech practices.

The U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust ruling against Google for monopolising publisher ad servers and ad exchanges has enabled publishers to pursue compensation for alleged lost ad revenue, as the case now moves into the remedies phase. Multiple major publishers have filed coordinated lawsuits in New York, arguing that Google’s tying of Google Ad Manager and AdX depressed inventory prices, restricted competition, and reduced publisher revenue.

Legal experts note that while the DOJ ruling lowers the legal hurdle, publishers must still prove direct, publisher-specific financial harm caused by Google’s conduct. Google is appealing the decision, while publishers are seeking structural remedies, including separating ad server and exchange products, alongside compensatory damages.

Microsoft says it’s building an app store for AI content licensing.

Microsoft is developing the Publisher Content Marketplace, an AI licensing hub that lets publishers define usage terms for AI model training while providing AI companies with scalable access and usage-based reporting. The marketplace is being co-designed with major publishers and launched as a pilot amid growing legal and commercial pressure to pay for content used in AI systems, with Microsoft saying it has begun onboarding partners and plans to expand.

IAB Releases Draft Legislation Addressing AI Scraping.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau has released draft legislation, the AI Accountability for Publishers Act, proposing that AI companies pay publishers for large-scale scraping and use of content to train models and generate AI summaries. The proposal frames unpaid AI content use as unjust enrichment and warns that without rapid legislative action, ad-supported publishing could face accelerated decline similar to the collapse of local news in the mid-2000s.

UK publishers team up for programmatic ad platform.

Six major UK publishers have launched Atria, a shared programmatic marketplace designed to give advertisers scaled access to premium magazine audiences through a single buy, with a combined reach of 33 million consumers. Participating publishers include Bauer, Future, Hearst UK, Hello!, Immediate and Time Out, allowing agencies to target niche but valuable audiences without setting up multiple deals across different sites.

The platform is hosted by Permutive, which uses first-party data signals to create robust, interest-based audience segments across the portfolio. Publishers and agencies position Atria as a way to combine scale, trusted editorial environments, and brand-safe targeting in one marketplace, reducing operational friction for buyers.

▸ Week 5

• - Prebid Announces Prebid Sales Agent
• - AI Opt-Out Rights – Real Effects on Publishers
• - How ChatGPT Ads Could Impact Publishers
• - Ad Spend Expected to Rise in 2026
• - How Big Publishers Approach AI
• - Commission Opens DMA Proceedings on Google
• - Programmatic Advertising on TV is Set to Increase
• - Microsoft Stops Caching Prebid Video Files in April

Prebid Announces Prebid Sales Agent in Collaboration with AgenticAdvertising.org.

Prebid has taken stewardship of the Prebid Sales Agent, making agentic advertising available to publishers through trusted, open source infrastructure governed by the Ad Context Protocol. This means publishers of any size can access automated, agent-led direct buying without heavy engineering, proprietary vendors, or lock-in.

The Sales Agent becomes part of the core Prebid stack, letting publishers connect programmatic and agentic buyers through one unified setup while keeping control of data, pricing, and business rules. Bottom line: direct deals get faster, more scalable, and more automated, using tools publishers already know and trust.

Google’s forced AI opt out: what changes — and what doesn’t — for publishers.

The UK CMA has proposed rules that would finally give publishers real control over how Google uses their content in AI features, including the right to opt out of AI Overviews without losing search rankings and to get clearer attribution and usage data. Google says it will comply and explore new opt-out controls, but the proposals stop short of forcing a clean separation between AI and search crawlers, which publishers see as the real fix.

As a result, this is a meaningful but limited win: opt-out and transparency help, but they do not solve traffic loss, revenue erosion, or the “AI ate the click” problem. Publishers are now pushing for enforceable, structural remedies, clearer data proof, and fair licensing models, because safeguards without accountability are just promises with good PR.

Media Briefing: ‘A bitter pill’: ChatGPT ads are coming – where do publishers fit?

OpenAI is introducing ads in ChatGPT, turning it from a utility into a monetised media platform that earns revenue from publisher content without any clear revenue share, attribution, or traffic return. For publishers, the immediate risks are deeper traffic displacement, zero-click behaviour getting worse, and new competition for ad budgets, especially intent-driven spend.

While some see ChatGPT ads as experimental for now, its scale puts it on a collision course with publishers’ ad businesses and may force renegotiation of existing content licensing deals. Bigger picture: once AI answers become ad-funded distribution layers, publishers risk losing control over visibility, value capture, and monetisation unless they secure clearer rules, data, and commercial participation.

‘There seems to be a mind shift’: Advertisers keep ad spending flexible as uncertainty persists.

Heading into 2026, ad budgets are growing but in a more cautious, tightly controlled way, with advertisers prioritising flexibility over long-term commitments. Buyers are shifting spend toward CTV, programmatic and brand advertising, while demanding proof of real business outcomes and the ability to optimise or pull spend mid-flight.

For publishers, this raises the bar: inventory that is rigid, slow to transact or weak on measurement is easier to bypass as ad dollars move like actively managed portfolios. The message is clear: to stay competitive, publishers must offer cleaner signals, flexible deal structures and stronger links between exposure and measurable results.

Digiday+ Research: How publishers from Dow Jones and Business Insider to People Inc. are approaching AI in 2026.

AI is now mainstream in publishing, with 93% of publishers using it in 2025, mostly embedded into everyday workflows rather than experiments. The dominant use case remains efficiency, with half of publishers using AI only internally to automate tasks like transcription, translation, tagging, data analysis and CMS workflows, while keeping humans firmly in editorial control.

Around 38% now also use AI in limited content-facing ways, such as recommendations, search, audio and personalisation, but not for writing news. Publishers are increasingly investing in dedicated AI leadership and teams, signalling that AI is becoming a core operational capability, not a side project.

Generative AI is favoured over predictive AI, especially in sales, marketing, research and creative production, where it saves time and improves speed to market. The clear industry line is human-in-the-loop governance, with publishers prioritising oversight, ethics and quality while using AI to scale output, improve audience experience and protect editorial standards.

Commission opens proceedings to assist Google in complying with interoperability and online search data sharing obligations under the Digital Markets Act.

The European Commission has launched two DMA specification proceedings to clarify how Google must comply with obligations around Android interoperability and access to Google Search data. The cases focus on equal access to AI-related Android features for third parties and on providing anonymised search ranking, query, click and view data to eligible providers on fair, non-discriminatory terms.

Programmatic advertising on TV is set to increase this year.

Programmatic advertising is taking a larger share of TV budgets as spend shifts from linear TV to streaming and CTV, making TV more accessible to smaller and mid-sized advertisers. Comcast reports a 14% increase in advertisers running programmatic TV ads and a 29% rise in ad views from new advertisers in the first half of 2025.

Improved targeting, first-party data usage and easier programmatic access are attracting performance-led advertisers, including those new to TV, while major streamers like Netflix, Disney and NBCU expand programmatic inventory. Demand is also growing for programmatic access to premium and live event inventory, though regional and local TV providers still lag behind national players in programmatic capabilities.

Microsoft To Stop Caching Prebid Video Files, Leaving Publishers With A Major Ad Serving Problem.

Microsoft will stop free caching of Prebid video ad files on April 30 as it shuts down the Xandr DSP, disrupting how video ads are served via Prebid and Google Ad Manager. Without a replacement, many Prebid video impressions will result in VAST errors, meaning auctions clear but no video ad actually plays, affecting a large share of US sites using GAM.

The Microsoft cache currently handles over 60% of Prebid-to-GAM video impressions, and alternative caching options exist but are paid and require publishers to update their setups. Prebid is exploring a local caching workaround, but it comes with technical trade-offs and potential losses in AdX revenue, leaving publishers with urgent implementation decisions before the deadline.

▸ Week 4

• - AI Will Reshape Publishers’ Websites in 2026
• - Publishers Rethink SEO as AI Transforms Search
• - IAB Europe Updates Retail Media Standards
• - Programmatic Live Sports Inventory Expands
• - Amazon Launches Prebid Adapter (Open Beta)
• - Europe Reviews Google’s Ad Tech Concessions
• - Publishers Diversify as Global Revenue Plateaus
• - IAB Tech Lab Opens Event & Conversion API
  
• - Ad Tech Faces Accelerating Consolidation

Bold Call: AI will rewrite publishers’ websites in 2026.

Publishers are accelerating the use of AI to personalise homepages and content experiences, moving beyond static layouts toward sites that adapt in real time to reader behavior and intent.AI-driven summaries, chatbots and video formats are becoming central tools as publishers seek to boost engagement, repeat visits and time spent onsite in response to declining and more volatile search traffic.

Personalisation is increasingly seen as a filter rather than a replacement for editorial judgment, helping balance what readers want with what editors deem important. Looking ahead, publishers are also exploring agentic AI, in which websites proactively surface content and interact with users while maintaining the website's core role: highlighting the best journalism of the day. 

Media Briefing: The anatomy of the publishers’ SEO dilemma.

Publishers are rethinking SEO in 2026 as AI reshapes search and reliance on Google becomes increasingly risky. While search traffic is declining and growing more volatile, few publishers are abandoning Google entirely. Instead, they are cautiously rebalancing traffic sources and shifting focus from scale to engagement, conversions and high-value audiences.

SEO efforts are becoming more tactical, with content structured to be better understood by AI systems, but core principles remain unchanged: long-term trust, quality journalism and loyal audiences matter more than short-term visibility gains.

IAB Europe Releases Updated Commerce (Incl. Retail) Media Standards & Flexi Ad Sizes Guidelines for Retail Media Networks.

IAB Europe has released updated Commerce (incl. Retail) Media Measurement Standards V2 alongside new Flexi Ad Sizes Guidelines, aiming to improve measurement clarity and scalable activation across retail media.The updated standards introduce clearer definitions for sales metrics, a more refined measurement funnel, and a formalised approach to incrementality, addressing long-standing concerns around standardisation in retail media.

At the same time, the Flexi Ad Sizes Guidelines seek to reduce creative fragmentation by recommending four flexible aspect ratios that work consistently across devices and retail media networks. For publishers and retail media players, the updates support more comparable measurement, smoother activation, and more scalable commercial growth.

Race for Programmatic Access to Live Sports Heats Up with UFC Inventory on Paramount+.

Paramount has announced live, in-game programmatic buying for premium sports content, starting with UFC events on Paramount+. Advertisers will be able to access select live ad units programmatically via major DSPs, including Amazon DSP, Google DV360, The Trade Desk and Yahoo. The move marks a significant step in opening high-value live sports inventory to programmatic buying, combining real-time access with guaranteed placements.

It also reflects growing advertiser demand for scalable, addressable live sports inventory in an increasingly fragmented CTV landscape. As more broadcasters and agencies invest in programmatic and AI-driven trading for live events, sports continues to stand out as one of the few content categories capable of delivering large, simultaneous audiences at scale.

Amazon Publisher Services launches Prebid Adapter in open beta.

Amazon Publisher Services (APS) has released its Prebid adapter in open beta, allowing publishers to connect their existing Prebid setups directly with Amazon Ads demand and over 60 third-party buyers via TAM and UAM.The integration enables access to Amazon demand without changes to current auction architectures, while improving latency and enriching auction signals.

Publishers retain full control over which demand sources and signals are activated. The launch reinforces Prebid’s role as a core monetisation framework and highlights growing demand for interoperability, transparency, and publisher-controlled integrations in programmatic advertising.

As U.S. courts near a remedy, Europe puts Google’s ad tech concessions under the microscope.

As U.S. courts move closer to issuing remedies in Google’s ad tech antitrust case, the European Commission is closely examining whether Google’s recent ad tech changes meaningfully address competition concerns.

Google has removed Unified Pricing Rules and reduced Open Bidding revenue share to zero in the EU, restoring pricing flexibility for publishers and reducing AdX’s structural advantage. However, European stakeholders largely view these steps as insufficient behavioural remedies that fail to resolve Google’s structural dominance across the ad tech stack.

The EU’s response could influence how global remedies take shape, but much will ultimately hinge on the upcoming U.S. court ruling and whether regulators pursue behavioural fixes or more far-reaching structural measures.

Global news industry revenue level in 2025 as publishers diversify beyond print.

According to WAN-IFRA, global news media revenues totalled $125.7 billion in 2025, remaining broadly flat year over year. Print still accounts for the largest share of revenue, but its long-term decline continues as publishers invest more heavily in digital operations and diversified income streams.

Digital advertising and paid digital subscriptions have stalled at around 30% of total revenue, while alternative revenue sources — including events, B2B services, platform partnerships and memberships — are growing rapidly and now make up a quarter of publisher income.

The report also highlights the scale gap between publishers and tech giants, with global news revenues dwarfed by companies like Alphabet and Meta. Despite these pressures, publisher confidence is improving, with a majority of news leaders expressing optimism about their business prospects in the years ahead.

IAB Tech Lab Announces Event and Conversion API (ECAPI) For Public Comment.

IAB Tech Lab has announced the Event and Conversion API (ECAPI), a new technical specification open for public comment. The standard aims to simplify and standardise how marketing events and conversions are shared between advertisers, platforms, and partners.

ECAPI defines a common set of full-funnel events, from upper-funnel engagement to lower-funnel conversions. By enabling consistent event sharing, the specification supports outcome-driven campaign optimisation, improved measurement, and future agentic buying and optimisation use cases.

Today, most platforms operate proprietary Conversion APIs, which makes multi-platform integrations complex and costly to maintain. ECAPI addresses this by offering a flexible but consistent framework that reduces integration overhead while improving data quality and interoperability.

Ad Tech Briefing: Consolidation in a ‘Hunger Games scenario’ – and a true loss for the industry.

The ad tech market is moving toward deeper consolidation as ad spend continues to concentrate around major platforms like Google, Meta, and Amazon. The open web is shrinking, putting pressure on independent ad tech companies to find new revenue streams or merge to survive.

At the same time, rapid advances in AI are accelerating the shift from automation to agentic decision-making, where distribution power and scale increasingly determine winners. For publishers, this signals a tougher competitive landscape and a growing need to understand who ultimately controls value and access in the advertising ecosystem.

▸ Week 3

• - IAB Europe’s Attitudes to Digital Advertising Report 2026
• - UK Marketing Budgets Flat in Q4 2025 (IPA Bellwether Report)
• - Google draws its AI payment lines – publishers’ leverage is narrowing
• - Google now prioritising YouTube and X over publishers on Discover
• - Essential OpenRTB updates for your 2026 roadmap
• - Major publishers sue Google over antitrust violations-
• - Ad tech’s agentic gambit at CES
• - Global publisher Google traffic dropped by a third in 2025
  

IAB Europe's Attitudes to Digital Advertising Report 2026.

IAB Europe’s Attitudes to Digital Advertising Report 2026 shows that digital advertising investment in Europe is still growing, with most respondents expecting higher spend or revenue over the next year, which is positive for publisher demand. Programmatic maturity is strongest in display and video, while CTV and digital audio lag due to limited transparency and operational confidence, creating both risk and opportunity for publishers willing to invest early.

Cross-channel activation remains low, signalling that publishers who can offer unified, cross-format inventory and measurement have a clear competitive edge. Media quality issues such as fraud, brand safety, viewability, and transparency are the biggest blockers to growth, while CTV, AI, and Retail & Commerce Media stand out as the most promising areas for future publisher revenue.

UK Marketing Budgets Flat in Q4 2025: IPA Bellwether Report.

UK marketing budgets ended 2025 flat, with the IPA Bellwether showing spend stagnation in Q4 as brands prioritised caution amid economic and political uncertainty, even though most avoided outright cuts. While some traditional channels declined, digital remained resilient, with video continuing to grow year-on-year and CTV and Smart TV environments emerging as key drivers of attention, measurement, and premium outcomes.

Advertisers are not retreating from marketing but reallocating budgets toward channels that can clearly demonstrate ROI, flexibility, and accountability, including digital video, audio, and other online formats. Trust, media quality, and brand-safe environments are increasingly critical, as consumer confidence and perceived credibility directly influence performance and long-term growth.

AI, data quality, stable identifiers, and advanced measurement, such as brand lift, are becoming central to making constrained budgets work harder across the funnel. Overall, the market is cautious but intentional, rewarding publishers and partners that offer transparency, premium contexts, strong data foundations, and measurable impact rather than raw scale. 

The Rundown: Google has drawn its AI payment lines — and publishers’ leverage is narrow.

Google has told UK lawmakers it will pay publishers for controlled access to content, such as archives or APIs, but not for using open-web journalism to train AI models, drawing a hard line that limits future licensing upside for publishers. The company also refuses to treat AI Overviews as a compensable use of news content, despite their clear impact on click-through traffic and publisher revenue.

In practice, publishers have no clean way to opt out of AI Overviews without harming search visibility, as tools like NOSNIPPET can significantly reduce traffic. The outcome reinforces that publishers’ remaining leverage sits in paid access and tightly controlled datasets, while the fight over training use and AI summaries is increasingly shifting to regulators rather than commercial negotiation.

Google now prioritising Youtube and X over publishers on Discover.

Google is reshaping Discover to prioritise AI summaries, YouTube videos and X posts, reducing visibility and referral traffic for publishers who have historically depended on it as a major traffic source. In several markets, AI summaries now dominate the Discover feed and primarily drive users to YouTube, with research showing most clicks bypass publisher sites entirely.

This shift signals that Discover is moving from a traffic distribution channel to an engagement layer designed to keep users inside Google’s ecosystem. For publishers, Discover should now be treated as a volatile and declining dependency, where content may fuel AI or video experiences without delivering sustainable, monetisable traffic. 

Essential OpenRTB Updates You Can’t Ignore for your 2026 Roadmap.

The 2025 updates from IAB Tech Lab focus on removing friction in programmatic CTV and directly impact how publishers plan, package, and monetise premium inventory. Upgrading to Content Taxonomy 3.1 and using extended content identifiers in OpenRTB is now essential, as richer, standardised content signals improve targeting, brand suitability, and revenue without exposing sensitive programme data.

New sidecar APIs, including Concurrent Streams and upcoming Forecasting APIs, give publishers real-time and pre-event visibility into live audience spikes, reducing missed ad opportunities during high-demand moments. The Deals API tackles widespread deal underdelivery by standardising deal metadata, cutting manual errors, and improving transparency around who packages and curates inventory.

Together, these standards allow publishers to move from reactive monetisation to proactive planning across CTV and live events. Publishers that implement them as a system, rather than piecemeal, gain clear advantages in yield, operational efficiency, and buyer trust going into 2026.

The Atlantic, Penske, and Vox Media have all sued Google for antitrust violations.

Multiple major publishers including Vox Media, The Atlantic, Penske Media, McClatchy and Condé Nast’s owner Advance Publications have filed antitrust lawsuits alleging Google used its ad tech dominance to suppress competition and depress publisher ad revenues. The claims centre on Google’s control of publisher ad servers and ad exchanges, which courts have already ruled were illegally monopolised and tightly bundled, leaving publishers with little bargaining power or ability to switch providers.

Publishers argue this has directly limited their ability to monetise inventory fairly and fund high-quality journalism. The outcome now hinges on remedies expected later this year, which could force changes to Google’s ad tech practices or even a structural breakup, with significant implications for publisher revenue and market competition.

Ad Tech Briefing: Ad tech’s agentic gambit at CES.

CES signalled a clear shift toward agentic AI becoming core infrastructure across ad tech, with major platforms embedding automation directly into planning, buying, optimisation and measurement workflows. DSPs and SSPs such as Yahoo, Viant, PubMatic, and Magnite are positioning AI not as a feature, but as an operating layer that reduces human intervention.

For publishers, this raises the stakes around transparency, control, and interoperability, as buyers increasingly rely on autonomous systems making decisions inside live auctions and curated marketplaces. The direction of travel is clear: publishers will need to adapt to AI-native buying environments where value is shaped less by “programmatic tactics” and more by how well inventory, data access, and controls plug into automated decisioning systems.

Global publisher Google traffic dropped by a third in 2025.

New data from Chartbeat and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism shows Google search traffic to publishers fell by roughly a third YoY with Google Discover referrals also sharply down, confirming a structural decline in platform-driven traffic. The drops are closely linked to Google’s AI summaries and Overviews, which particularly hurt utility and evergreen content, and publishers now expect average traffic declines of more than 40% over the next three years.

While social traffic is mixed, with short-term gains on Facebook and X in some markets, most publishers plan to reduce effort on both and shift focus elsewhere. In response, publishers are prioritising subscriptions, YouTube distribution, AI platform engagement, and differentiated content such as original reporting, analysis, and community-building, as reliance on search and social becomes increasingly risky.

▸ Week 2

• - Media executives prioritise AI-led monetisation, premium video and direct deals for 2026
• - Media spend is expected to cool in 2026 as buyers demand flexibility and measurable ROI
• - Google loses in court but faces few meaningful constraints on its market power
• - UK video revenues surge, reinforcing video as a structural growth driver
• - NBCUniversal tests agentic buying to automate and speed up premium deal-making
• - AI search disrupts open-web traffic, forcing publishers to rethink growth strategies
• - IAB Tech Lab unveils agentic roadmap built on existing programmatic standards
• - Publishers build their own creator networks to regain control of audiences and revenue
  

Media Briefing: Here’s what media execs are prioritising in 2026.

Publishers are entering 2026 with renewed focus on monetisation after a bruising 2025, prioritising AI-driven revenue, premium video, direct and PMP deals, and major tentpole moments like US elections and the FIFA World Cup. AI is moving from experimentation to core infrastructure on the sell side, supporting smarter pricing, audience packaging, yield management, RFP automation and faster, more precise media planning that extracts more value from fewer visits.

KPIs are shifting away from raw traffic towards engagement, conversions, subscriptions and registrations, with growing investment in measuring “AI visibility” to understand how often and where publisher content is surfaced across LLMs and AI search tools. As search and social referrals weaken, publishers are doubling down on brand marketing to strengthen direct relationships, drive logged-in audiences and improve the quality of demand they bring to advertisers.

Video is a major growth lever, with publishers expanding brand-safe on-site video, streaming and social formats, alongside creator collaborations that unlock higher CPMs and scalable branded content programmes. To maximise revenue, many publishers are packaging these strengths into integrated, cross-channel offerings that combine premium inventory, creators, content production and distribution, aligning with how buyers now plan and spend.

What does media spend look like for 2026? It could be worse — and it might be.

After a strong 2025, the US ad market is expected to cool in 2026, with growth forecast at roughly 6.6% excluding political spend, down from the 11% year that benefited digital-first and emerging advertiser categories. For publishers, the risk is not collapse but caution: elevated economic uncertainty is pushing buyers to delay commitments, allocate budgets quarterly, and demand far more flexibility in how and where spend is activated.

This uncertainty is accelerating a shift towards lower-funnel, measurable channels, increasing pressure on the sell side to prove ROI, performance impact and business outcomes rather than just reach or scale.  Brand-heavy channels like linear TV face the most friction, while CTV, streaming, digital OOH, retail media, search, social and influencer formats continue to attract budget due to their perceived agility and measurability.

Major events and political advertising will absorb large volumes of spend early and at lower unit rates, limiting upside for publishers reliant on premium pricing or late-stage scatter opportunities. In this environment, publishers that can offer flexible buying models, clear performance metrics, and diversified digital inventory across video, CTV and performance-aligned formats will be best positioned to defend and grow revenue in 2026.

The Year Google Lost In Court And Won Anyway.

Despite guilty verdicts in Google’s search and publisher ad tech monopoly cases, 2025 delivered few meaningful constraints, with no forced divestitures and only limited behavioural remedies, making it a relatively good year for Google in practice. Hopes that 2026 will materially rebalance the market remain low, as observers increasingly doubt courts will require Google to sell AdX or meaningfully restructure Google Ad Manager.

For publishers, the most tangible gains so far come from smaller regulatory concessions, such as the removal of Unified Pricing Rules in Europe, which restores some control over bid floors across display, video and in-app inventory. These incremental changes matter, but without stronger structural remedies, publishers should not expect antitrust action alone to materially weaken Google’s market power or transform sell-side competition in the near term.

2025 Video Sales Drive Highest Growth in UK Entertainment Revenues Since Pandemic.

UK video revenues grew 8% YoY in 2025 to £5.44bn, outpacing economic growth and reinforcing video as the strongest-performing entertainment category, creating a healthy environment for publisher video monetisation. SVOD now accounts for the bulk of growth, with subscriptions up 8.8%, signalling sustained consumer demand for streaming and premium video experiences that advertisers increasingly prioritise.

The slowdown in physical decline and the scale of total entertainment growth show that video consumption is structural, not cyclical, supporting long-term investment in video inventory, formats and audience development. For publishers, this momentum strengthens the case for expanding brand-safe video, CTV and streaming offerings that align with where consumer attention and ad budgets continue to grow.

NBCUniversal Test Out Agentic Buying Across Linear and Digital Inventory.

Agentic media trading has moved quickly from theory to practice, with NBCUniversal testing AI agents that negotiate and execute cross-platform ad deals, including live sports inventory across linear TV and streaming.  In these tests, buyer and seller agents exchange briefs, propose inventory packages, refine details and create orders automatically, significantly reducing manual back-and-forth while keeping humans in approval and activation roles.

For publishers, this approach promises faster deal cycles, more efficient monetisation of premium, high-value inventory and lower operational overhead for direct and IO-based trading. While questions remain about the long-term role of human traders and existing programmatic workflows, the pace of adoption suggests agentic AI could soon reshape how premium inventory is packaged, sold and activated.

The AI Search Reckoning Is Dismantling Open Web Traffic – And Publishers May Never Recover.

Generative AI has severely disrupted open-web monetisation, with AI Overviews and chat-based search driving massive declines in publisher referral traffic, often cutting 20–90% of visits and revenue in 2025. CTR collapses when AI summaries appear, hurting both organic and paid search, while AI platforms currently account for only about 1% of total publisher traffic, far too little to offset losses.

The impact now extends beyond news and blogs into ecommerce and long-tail content, affecting small independents and large media groups alike, accelerating layoffs, closures and revenue diversification efforts. For publishers, the takeaway is blunt: search is no longer a reliable growth engine, and survival depends on reducing platform dependence through direct relationships, diversified monetisation, and aggressive experimentation with how AI can be used, not just endured.

IAB Tech Lab Unveils Agentic Roadmap for Digital Advertising.

IAB Tech Lab has released an Agentic Roadmap showing how AI-driven buying and selling can scale by extending existing standards, rather than introducing new, fragmented ones. For publishers, this means agentic workflows can be adopted faster and more safely, using familiar frameworks like OpenRTB, OpenDirect, VAST, GPP and TCF, while preserving control, privacy and performance.

By adding modern protocols such as Model Context Protocol and gRPC, the roadmap enables machine-speed transactions, lower integration effort and reduced operational risk on the sell side. Looking ahead to 2026, open-source seller agents, trust and measurement signals, and interoperable execution layers could help publishers automate monetisation more efficiently without surrendering transparency or governance.

Why publishers are building their own creator networks.

Publishers are shifting from platform-led video strategies to creator networks they control, combining editorial credibility with personality-led video to rebuild audience loyalty and reach younger users. This model helps publishers monetise where ad budgets are growing fastest, as brands increasingly favour creator-style content for its engagement, efficiency and alignment with social and video algorithms.

Early results show strong upside, including higher social traffic, deeper engagement and new revenue streams from ads, affiliates, events and revenue-sharing models. For publishers, curated creator ecosystems offer a practical path to diversify revenue, reduce platform dependence and stay competitive as audiences and advertiser spend continue to move toward creators.

▸ Week 1

Happy Holidays! The weekly wrap will be back on 9th January.

▸ Week 52

Happy Holidays! The weekly wrap will be back on 9th January.

▸ Week 51

• - Media Buyers Pull Spend from OpenPath Over Transparency Concerns
• - Top Trends in the Media Industry for 2025
• - Google Scraps Unified Pricing Rules Affecting Publisher Yield
• - Publishers Rate Big Tech’s AI Licensing Deals
• - How Digital Advertising Shapes Today’s Media Ecosystem
• - Experts Predict Digital Ad Spend in 2026
• - Publishers Turn to Third Parties for AI Prompt Data
  
  

   

Media buyers shift spend from The Trade Desk’s OpenPath over transparency concerns. 

The Trade Desk’s results have stabilised, but OpenPath is facing sustained pushback from media agencies over opaque costs and limited transparency, leading several buyers to pause or pull spend despite its promise of a cleaner supply path.

While some agencies and The Trade Desk argue OpenPath improves efficiency and performance, sceptics say uncertainty around true take rates and pricing makes it hard to justify to clients, keeping trust issues firmly unresolved.

Media Briefing: The top trends in the media industry for 2025.

2025 started shakily for digital advertising due to economic uncertainty, but momentum improved through the year, with Q4 pacing well and many publishers expecting renewed growth into 2026. AI content licensing matured as more tech giants entered the market and deals shifted from generic training rights to product-specific and usage-based models.

At the same time, publishers faced SEO upheaval as search traffic and clickthroughs declined, forcing teams to prioritise brand visibility and conversions over raw scale. To reach younger audiences and drive future ad growth, publishers doubled down on vertical video and creator networks, positioning video as both an engagement and revenue engine.

Google removes unified pricing rules that hit publisher ad yield in 2019.

Google has ended its unified pricing rules, allowing publishers to set different price floors for Google and non-Google bidders for the first time in over six years. The change follows antitrust rulings in the US and Europe, where regulators found Google’s adtech practices anti-competitive and ordered it to end self-preferencing across the supply chain.

Unified pricing had often suppressed publisher yield by forcing a single floor price across all demand, which publishers had previously used to protect against Google’s data advantage. While seen as a move to avoid harsher remedies like divestment, publishers’ groups say this is the first change delivering immediate and tangible relief for most publishers.

Digiday Scorecard: Publishers rate Big Tech’s AI licensing deals.

AI licensing has rapidly become crowded, with publishers now weighing a growing mix of deals across platforms that differ widely on transparency, payments, traffic impact and crawler behaviour, and the overall verdict is blunt: none are doing enough.

- Microsoft currently leads the pack thanks to collaborative messaging, pay-per-use economics and relatively strong traffic return, though trust remains cautious and access is limited to a small group.

- OpenAI follows closely with the most deals in place, but concerns are rising about unanswered outreach, traffic cannibalisation and its longer-term ambitions, while

- Meta and Amazon sit mid-table with newer, quieter or more narrowly scoped arrangements.

- Google ranks near the bottom, with publishers deeply unsettled by AI Overviews, opaque economics and minimal willingness to meaningfully pay for content despite recent cosmetic changes.

- Perplexity fares poorly due to low payouts, trust issues and alleged crawler abuse, even though it offers revenue sharing and some attribution.

- Prorata stands out as a hopeful alternative with a fairer revenue-share model and transparency, while Anthropic trails badly, criticised for uncooperative crawlers, zero licensing appetite and ongoing legal battles.

New IAB Europe Report Reveals How Digital Advertising Shapes the Social Fabric of Today’s Media Ecosystem. 

IAB Europe has released Beyond Reach, a first-of-its-kind report examining how digital advertising addresses social sustainability across Europe and beyond. The report finds that while environmental impact has dominated industry focus, social impacts such as misinformation, media plurality, accessibility and diversity remain largely unmeasured and unstandardised.

Although initiatives are emerging across content assessment, measurement and media buying, efforts are fragmented with no shared definitions, KPIs or consistent standards. IAB Europe concludes that coordinated, interoperable frameworks are now needed to embed social impact and public value into everyday media planning and investment decisions.

Ad Tech Briefing: How the experts predict digital ad spend will pan out in 2026.

U.S. ad spend is forecast to grow 6.6% next year, down from roughly 11% in 2025, with growth moderating rather than collapsing and largely excluding the impact of political advertising. Digital continues to dominate, now accounting for 72% of spend, with gains concentrated in CTV, digital video and channels offering first-party data, closed-loop measurement and AI-driven optimisation.

Programmatic spend is still expanding, but growth is uneven: while programmatic CTV, DOOH and digital audio are rising fast, total open-internet ad revenues are expected to be flat, putting pressure on independent ad tech and publishers. Most incremental growth is expected to flow to closed platforms like Amazon, Google and social media, as advertisers prioritise price and performance over transparency and control.

Publishers are hunting for AI prompt data — now they’re starting to get it from third-party companies. 

As AI search grows, publishers can no longer rely on traditional analytics and are turning to new third-party tools to track how and where their content appears in AI-generated answers. Because platforms like Google and OpenAI do not share visibility data, firms such as Semrush, Similarweb and Profound are using modeled, synthetic and clickstream data to give publishers a directional view into citations, prompts and AI Overviews.

The data is imperfect and probabilistic, meaning it’s best used for comparison and trend analysis rather than precise measurement. While AI-driven referral traffic is still tiny, publishers can use visibility insights to shape content strategy, support advertiser pitches and strengthen their hand in AI licensing negotiations.

▸ Week 50

• - Media and Advertising Outlook for 2026
• - IAB Tech Lab Releases New Programmatic CTV Guidance
• - How Publishers Are Adapting to the Zero-Click Era
• - Why More Publishers Are Moving to Substack
• - Agencies Push Curation Upstream in Programmatic
• - EU Investigates Google’s AI-Generated Search Summaries
• - Programmatic Advertising Expands Into AI Chatbots
• - A New Baseline for Ad Tech Transparency
  
  

In Graphic Detail: What to expect in media in 2026. 

CMOs are already shaping 2026 media plans, guided by fresh forecasts from WPP, Dentsu, Madison & Wall and WARC. WPP highlights that retail, finance and travel media spend will surpass TV this year, driven by increasingly shoppable and data-powered TV formats. North American ad revenue is set to grow 7.6% in 2026, boosted by U.S. midterms, major sporting events and renewed economic clarity.

Dentsu expects tech and beverage categories to fuel global spend, with AI-related product launches and global elections leading the charge. Programmatic buying will keep expanding, though much of the growth will concentrate inside walled gardens as open-web revenues decline. Across the industry, AI and automation now eclipse sustainability and brand-building as marketers’ top priority for 2026.

IAB Tech Lab Announces CTV Ad Portfolio and Updated Guide to Programmatic CTV.

IAB Tech Lab has released a new CTV Ad Portfolio defining 6 core CTV ad formats and updated its Guide to Programmatic CTV, with public comments open until 31 January 2026.The updates introduce clearer standards and OpenRTB support, especially for Pause and Menu formats, to streamline how CTV formats are traded.

With CTV now dominating U.S. TV viewing, these unified definitions aim to reduce rendering issues, cut duplicate creative production, and ease operational strain for publishers and buyers. Industry leaders from GumGum, Disney and NBCUniversal welcome the move, noting that consistent standards will accelerate scale, interoperability and overall CTV revenue growth.

How The Arena Group is rewriting its commercial playbook for the zero-click era. 

Facing steep drops in referral traffic, The Arena Group is using AI-driven content recommendations and its first-party data platform Encore to keep readers on-site longer and lift revenue per session.  The publisher aims to double pageviews per visit by 2026, with early gains in dwell time already generating several million dollars despite traffic declines of 25–50% across key brands.

Alongside improving user experience, the company is building an in-house curation desk to replace low-quality ads with personalised “smart slots,” expecting six-figure revenue from curation next year. Industry experts note that with AI answer engines reshaping search traffic, publishers must shift from chasing clicks to deepening loyalty and delivering cleaner, higher-value on-site experiences.

Media Briefing: Why publishers are flocking to Substack. 

Major publishers like The Economist, The New Yorker, FT and Daily Mail are flocking to Substack as a low-risk way to find new audiences, test niche formats and build tighter communities amid declining search and social traffic. Most newsletters are free, with some paid tiers, allowing publishers to experiment without cannibalising core subscriptions while using Substack’s discovery tools and community features to grow.

Consultants warn that success on Substack requires original content, active participation and collaboration on the platform, not a passive “post and pray” approach. Publishers such as Reach, which now runs 25 Substacks, see the platform as a place to build standalone communities rather than drive traffic back to their sites, with 2026 set to reveal whether these experiments become a permanent strategy.

Agencies push curation upstream, reclaiming control of the programmatic bidstream. 

Agencies plan to tighten the definition of curation in 2026, shifting from static publisher lists and prebuilt PMPs toward dynamic, supply-level control that determines which impressions are allowed into the auction before DSPs optimise. Butler/Till exemplifies this shift by using SWYM.AI’s SelfCurate platform to score and assemble inventory in real time, producing cleaner bidstreams, reducing MFA exposure, and giving traders more precision and agility.

Holdcos like Dentsu are also curating directly at the SSP level, plugging into CTV ad servers to build one-to-one curated paths with publishers using their own data, planning tools and AI. Overall, curation is moving away from intermediary packaging and toward agency-authored, supply-rooted marketplaces, pressuring SSPs to increase transparency, reduce reselling, and treat curation as true supply-path optimisation rather than a monetisation layer.

EU investigates Google over AI-generated summaries in search results.

The EU has launched a formal investigation into whether Google’s AI-generated search summaries and AI training practices use publishers’ and creators’ content without proper compensation or opt-out options. The probe also covers YouTube data and Google’s conversational AI Mode, amid concerns that AI Overviews are diverting traffic away from news sites, with some publishers reporting losses of up to 50% in clicks.

Campaigners argue that creators are effectively forced to allow Google to train AI on their work, calling the situation a threat to journalism, democracy and creative livelihoods. Google says the investigation risks stifling innovation, while the Commission insists AI must grow in a way that respects EU values, media diversity and creators’ rights.

Programmatic Ads Are Coming To AI Chatbot. 

PubMatic has partnered with Kontext to bring programmatic advertising into AI chatbots via OpenRTB, letting advertisers target users based on real-time conversational intent and giving early AI publishers higher fill rates and stronger performance. As ad budgets inevitably shift toward AI search and chat environments, experts predict many publishers will need to build their own chatbots to stay competitive in a rapidly expanding ecosystem that may mirror the mobile app marketplace.

We just did the math’: The new baseline for ad tech transparency.

The open web’s opacity stems from years of chasing cheap scale, piling on intermediaries and supply routes that buyers can no longer trace, and agencies at the Digiday summit signalled a renewed push for transparency driven by operational strain. SSPs emerged as a major friction point, with buyers citing huge unexplained gaps between bid and publisher revenue and tightening partnerships to only those willing to provide log-level data, clearer economics and more direct supply.

This shift is prompting agencies like Mindgruve and marketers like Georgia-Pacific to overhaul SSP strategies, while new channels such as CTV and retail media remain black boxes with limited insight into delivery or data provenance. AI threatens to deepen the opacity by accelerating polluted signals and vague pricing, raising the stakes for an open web that must fix transparency now or risk losing both trust and relevance.

▸ Week 49

• - Digital Omnibus ‘cookie fix’ leaves publishers worse off
• - Programmatic quality delivers better results without higher costs
• - Publishers double down on subscriptions amid market uncertainty
• - Publishers escalate fight against Google’s AI Overviews
• - IAB Tech Lab introduces Deals API for cleaner deal execution
• - New DSA transparency templates simplify EU ad disclosures
• - Programmatic Governance Council launches to tackle industry inefficiencies
• - Newsweek personalises its homepage with AI
• - Publishers bring vertical video back on-site
• - Publishers reassess 2025 revenue mix and priorities
  
  
  

European publishers say the Digital Omnibus ‘cookie fix’ leaves them worse off.

European publishers argue that the Digital Omnibus leaves them worse off. What was expected to simplify privacy rules is seen instead as a cosmetic update that adds complexity without helping ad-funded media. The biggest worry is browser-level consent: if users set tracking preferences once in Chrome, Safari or mobile OS settings, consent rates could collapse — echoing Apple’s ATT — cutting off essential data for advertising, measurement and fraud prevention.

Publishers are also unsure whether proposed exemptions for media services would work in practice, as ad tech vendors may avoid the legal risk of determining who qualifies. Meanwhile, the new one-click consent/reject rule is expected to drive consent rates even lower and make essential tracking harder to justify. Altogether, the Omnibus is seen as shifting more power to browsers and walled gardens, leaving open-web publishers with fewer tools and more uncertainty.

New Report Finds That Quality Pays Off In Programmatic – And It’s Not More Expensive.

Marketers know quality beats quantity, but they’re still addicted to cheap, low-quality media because legacy measurement rewards volume. Compliant’s tests show that buying from high-quality publishers with strong data practices lowers CPA and CPM while boosting ROAS, and it doesn’t necessarily cost more.

Brands like Reckitt are proving this by investing in data, tools and talent, building curated supply lists, and tailoring brand safety rules instead of blindly trusting big platforms. With AI raising the stakes for clean, transparent data, the industry may finally be pushed to break its bad habits.

Digiday+ Research Subscription Index 2025: Subscription strategies from Bloomberg, The New York Times, Vox and others.

Publishers entered 2025 with the same financial uncertainty as 2024, while also battling traffic loss from generative AI, pushing them to double down on subscriptions as a key revenue pillar. Digiday’s Subscription Index shows subscription revenue and focus have steadily increased since 2023, with most publishers keeping price hikes small except Bloomberg, which raised prices sharply without adding major perks.

High-priced publishers are leaning into bundles and games to boost perceived value and retention, with The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Chicago Tribune leading the trend. Games have become a major engagement tool across the industry, used both as free traffic drivers and as bundled subscriber perks.

Bloomberg also stands out for monetising newsletters separately, while Vox made the biggest shift by abandoning donations and introducing a paywall in 2025. Overall, publishers are experimenting aggressively with pricing, bundles, benefits and engagement tools to keep subscription revenue growing.

From lawsuits to lobbying: How publishers are fighting AI.

Publishers are intensifying their fight against Google’s AI Overviews, arguing it has caused major drops in traffic, revenue and click-through rates, with some reporting declines of up to 90%. A U.K.-based coalition has now taken its case to the U.S. Department of Justice, adding to complaints already filed with the U.K. and EU regulators, while industry groups like the PPA and major tech players like Cloudflare push for clearer rules and transparency around Google’s AI systems.

At the same time, publishers are pursuing lawsuits against AI firms such as Cohere and Google itself, accusing them of scraping journalism without permission and diverting traffic through AI-generated answers. The unifying theme is that publishers no longer accept being used as training data or traffic sources for AI products without accountability, transparency or compensation.

IAB Tech Lab Releases Deals API to Standardize Programmatic Deal Sync.

IAB Tech Lab has released the first version of its Deals API for public comment, aiming to standardise how SSPs and DSPs communicate programmatic deals and eliminate the messy manual entries that cause errors and lost revenue. The API gives clear visibility into who is involved in packaging a deal — seller, packager, curator — which boosts transparency, reduces mismatches, and helps rebuild trust in private marketplace transactions.

Industry leaders say this solves long-standing inefficiencies and lays the groundwork for cleaner data, better collaboration, and more innovation as deal-based buying continues to grow. Future versions will expand into full deal discoverability, giving all parties line of sight into where and how they’re included in the supply chain.

IAB Europe releases DSA Transparency Implementation Guidelines 1.2.

IAB Europe, IAB Tech Lab and industry partners have released standardised, optional DSA transparency text templates in 24 EU languages including easy-to-read versions to help platforms meet Article 26’s ad disclosure requirements. These multilingual resources, now part of the DSA Transparency Implementation Guidelines, aim to simplify compliance and ensure consistent, accessible transparency for users across the EU.

Ad Tech Briefing: The Programmatic Governance Council is a bid to reset power dynamics.

The IAB Tech Lab is launching a Programmatic Governance Council on 10 December to tackle long-standing business problems like bid duplication, opaque auction mechanics, and ballooning operational costs that waste billions each year.  The council is designed to put agencies and publishers, not intermediaries, in charge of defining the commercial rules that the tech layer should follow, reflecting frustration that technical fixes have failed without business alignment.

Its work sits alongside proposals like the “Grand Bargain,” which aims to cut duplication by having DSPs return multiple bids while publishers adopt TID/GPID properly, though the council won’t be asked to formally approve that plan. Whether this becomes a meaningful governance body or just another talking shop will depend on follow-through, but for now it represents a push for a more rational, transparent programmatic marketplace driven by buyer–seller priorities rather than platform interests.

Newsweek is building an AI Mode-like experience to customize homepages for readers.

Newsweek is building an AI-driven homepage with Google Cloud that mimics Google’s AI Mode, aiming to personalise the experience for every visitor and boost engagement as search referrals decline. The homepage will feature an AI assistant, localised information and personalised content recommendations, and Newsweek plans to expand it to pull from both its own archive and external sources.

The publisher is also rolling out additional AI tools from article-level “Ask Newsweek AI” chat, to translations, to personalised ranking algorithms, all enabled by its recent site redesign. Early tests show strong engagement lifts, and Newsweek hopes these AI-powered products will help diversify revenue and build deeper direct relationships with users.

Publishers Turn to On-Site Vertical Video to Build Stickier Audience Relationships.

Publishers are trying to reclaim short-form vertical video from TikTok, Reels and Shorts by bringing the format back onto their own sites, with new tools like Media.net’s Bytes giving them the tech backbone to host scrollable vertical feeds and control monetisation. Bytes lets publishers repurpose social videos, convert horizontal clips, or even generate AI-based videos from articles, while keeping editorial control over what gets published.

Although open-web demand for vertical video ads is still nascent, agencies and DSPs are beginning to show interest, and early tests show users spend more time on-site and deliver higher CPMs due to the format’s high attention. For publishers facing shrinking search referrals and AI-driven traffic drops, vertical video is becoming a key way to build stickier user experiences and stronger direct relationships.

Digiday+ Research: Where publisher revenue stands with ads, video, content licensing and subscriptions.

Publishers are entering 2026 reassessing their revenue mix, with direct-sold ads remaining the strongest and most stable source, and nearly all publishers planning to keep investing in it. Programmatic revenue and focus both declined year over year, reflecting broader market struggles, while video ads showed mixed signals: fewer publishers earn from video overall, but those who do are earning more.

Content licensing, including AI licensing deals, remains a small revenue contributor, with diminishing investment plans despite industry buzz. Subscriptions also slipped as a revenue source and priority, with fewer publishers deriving meaningful income from them or planning to grow them compared to last year.

▸ Week 48

• - Reach shifts to subscriptions as AI-era referral traffic declines
• - IAB Europe study shows uneven adoption of addressability & measurement
• - BuzzFeed, Vox, USA Today and Arena Group join RSL’s AI licensing framework
• - Press Gazette: ChatGPT accessed paywalled content despite safeguards
• - Broadsign acquires Place Exchange as programmatic DOOH accelerates
• - AudienceMix launches curated audience data model to cut segment overlap
• - DOJ v. Google: Judge signals pragmatic, behavioural-first remedy likely
  

‘The Big Bang has happened’: Reach gets proactive on AI-era referrals, starting with subscriptions.

Reach is overhauling its business after a brutal year, introducing its first-ever digital subscriptions as it moves away from relying on volatile search and social referrals. Traffic across its major titles has dropped around 30%, pushing the publisher to rethink everything from pricing models to newsroom priorities.

The company is betting on paid tiers, cleaner ad-light experiences, and heavier investment in video and first-party data to stabilise revenue in an AI-dominated landscape. Leadership admits the old referral model is broken, but sees subscriptions, better tech, and future AI licensing as the path back to meaningful digital growth.

IAB Europe Releases New Study on the Adoption of Addressability and Measurement Solutions Across Europe.

IAB Europe’s new Pan-European report shows that while most of the industry is familiar with addressability, true expertise is still concentrated in ad tech companies and agencies, leaving advertisers with the biggest knowledge gaps. The biggest challenges are cross-platform data access, strict privacy rules, and signal loss from cookie deprecation, alongside a clear need for standardisation across markets.

Adoption is rising for solutions like Data Clean Rooms, Unified IDs, contextual targeting, and seller-defined audiences, but measurement without cookies and inconsistent frameworks still hold companies back. The report stresses that moving the industry forward will require stronger education, clearer guidance, and more unified standards across Europe. 

Arena Group, BuzzFeed, USA Today Co, Vox Media join RSL’s AI content licensing efforts.

More major publishers, including BuzzFeed, Vox Media and USA Today Co, have joined the Really Simple Licensing Collective, a framework aimed at standardising how publishers license their content to AI systems.

RSL is collaborating with the IAB Tech Lab’s similar efforts, and both hope collective pressure will push AI firms toward fair compensation models. The group is now focused on scaling publisher participation globally before approaching AI companies, with a publicly available licensing agreement expected by year-end.

ChatGPT took Press Gazette content then said that could not have happened.

Press Gazette found that ChatGPT produced detailed data from behind its paywall, then gave a contradictory and misleading explanation claiming it had not accessed the site at all. The incident highlights how AI systems may be bypassing paywalls, scraping copyrighted content, and then hallucinating excuses when asked how they obtained it.

Industry experts noted that LLMs cannot meaningfully explain past reasoning, and that robots.txt offers little real protection since AI models may treat user prompts as permission to fetch paywalled content. The case sparked concern that OpenAI and others may be relying on opaque, loosely controlled data sources, raising fresh questions over licensing, ethics and enforcement.

Broadsign Acquires Place Exchange As The DOOH Category Hits Its Stride.

Broadsign has acquired Place Exchange, marking major consolidation in the growing digital out-of-home ad tech sector. DOOH is gaining programmatic momentum, but its targeting, measurement and creative needs differ enough from web and mobile that it still requires a specialised sell-side stack.

Most programmatic DOOH buying happens via deal IDs rather than open auctions, and the category spans diverse environments from retail screens to CTV-like displays. Rising interest from digital-native advertisers is accelerating demand, reinforcing why a dedicated OOH SSP remains necessary.

‘How AudienceMix Is Mixing Up The Data Sales Business.

AudienceMix is a new data-curation startup that helps marketers combine audience segments more efficiently by eliminating overlap and letting brands control how different data signals are weighted. Built on LiveRamp’s marketplace with over 8,200 syndicated audiences, it offers curated segments at a much lower CPM than typical off-the-shelf data.

The platform also helps niche data providers access demand they couldn’t reach on their own, while giving advertisers access to audiences unavailable elsewhere. Early adoption has been strong, and AudienceMix is now expanding its team, tech integrations and AI capabilities as it positions itself as a complementary rather than competitive player in the programmatic data landscape.

Ad Tech Briefing: Pragmatism, not idealism, will determine the fate of Google’s ad tech empire.

Judge Brinkema signalled in closing arguments that a forced divestiture of Google’s ad exchange or ad server is unlikely, favouring practical, enforceable remedies over sweeping structural changes. She repeatedly pressed the DOJ on timelines, feasibility and lack of detail, suggesting a behavioural-first approach with possible guardrails is more realistic.

Google argued the DOJ failed to justify divestiture or prove alternative remedies wouldn’t work, while the DOJ admitted it has no identified buyer. A ruling is expected in early–mid 2026, with an appeal almost certain, meaning any major structural outcome could be delayed until 2028.

▸ Week 47

• - EU’s Digital Omnibus eases ad tech burdens but strengthens Big Tech and AI agents
• - Publishers see Q4 uplift after a difficult year
• - The Atlantic intensifies blocking of AI-powered bot traffic
• - UK marketers boost 2026 ad budgets as demand stabilises
• - EU proposes simpler digital rules and new digital wallets
• - IAB Europe requests EDPB clarification on anonymisation after CJEU ruling
• - Wall Street questions the causes behind the ongoing programmatic “drama”
• - Google’s new RTB Control draws attention but no industry panic
  

The EU’s Digital Omnibus offers relief for ad tech, but hands more power to Big Tech and AI agents.

The EU’s new Digital Omnibus package aims to simplify digital regulation and reduce the administrative burden created by the GDPR, ePrivacy and the AI Act. It narrows and clarifies the definition of personal data and eases the treatment of pseudonymous identifiers, making data usage and measurement more workable for advertising.

The package also permits the use of certain personal data for AI model training under defined safeguards, a change that primarily benefits major technology and AI companies. Advertisers and ad tech players regain some of the measurement and optimisation capabilities lost after the GDPR, while the growing role of browsers and operating systems in privacy controls may weaken publishers’ position.

Overall, the package does not overturn the GDPR but softens its strict compliance culture.The practical effects are expected to materialise over the next 12–36 months.

Media Briefing: Tough market, but Q4 lifts publishers’ hopes for 2026.

Publishers are heading into 2026 with stronger-than-expected ad revenues, helped by solid Q4 programmatic performance and rising demand for premium video. Direct sales are softer, but many advertisers are already shifting budgets into early 2026, giving publishers unusually good visibility for next year.

AI summaries and economic uncertainty are still causing pressure on traffic and CPMs, though the fallout is milder than many feared. Overall, a healthier mix of PMP deals, premium video, and less traffic-dependent revenue streams is making publishers surprisingly optimistic about 2026.

Inside The Atlantic’s AI bot blocking strategy.

The Atlantic has created a scorecard to judge AI crawlers based on whether they send meaningful traffic or subscribers back, blocking any that provide little or no value. This system already led them to block one crawler that attempted more than half a million unauthorised visits in a week.

While some publishers block nearly all AI bots, The Atlantic only allows those that demonstrably drive traffic, subscriptions or come with licensing deals, though Google remains a special challenge because its AI usage is tied to search. The publisher hopes clearer rules plus tools like Cloudflare’s Content Signals will strengthen its negotiating position, even if major AI companies don’t fully comply.

Brand Activity Back on 2026 Plans as UK Marketers Boost Budgets.

UK marketers are surprisingly upbeat for 2026, with 65% expecting bigger budgets despite broader economic gloom and consumer weakness.  Performance spend was strong this year, but the ISBA survey shows a shift toward brand building next year, with UK marketers leaning far more brand-heavy than the global average.

Digital video and connected TV are set to be the biggest winners as linear TV and print continue to decline. AI is becoming central to media planning and optimisation, but concerns about transparency are pushing some marketers to consider outcome-based agency pricing models.

Simpler EU digital rules and new digital wallets to save billions for businesses and boost innovation.

The European Commission’s new digital package aims to cut admin and compliance burdens so businesses can focus more on innovation, potentially saving up to €5 billion in costs and unlocking €150 billion annually through European Business Wallets.

Its digital omnibus streamlines AI, cybersecurity and data rules, introduces simpler GDPR and cookie processes, and offers SMEs and mid-caps lighter AI compliance requirements and better access to regulatory sandboxes.

A new Data Union Strategy will expand access to high-quality data for AI while strengthening Europe’s data sovereignty. The European Business Wallet will give companies a unified digital identity to handle paperwork and cross-border operations more easily, supporting a more competitive and efficient EU economy.

IAB Europe Sends Letter to the EDPB on the Initiative to Organise a Stakeholder Event on Anonymisation and Pseudonymisation Following the CJEU Ruling in EDPS v. SRB.

A coalition of major European industry groups has urged the EDPB to ensure its upcoming workshop on anonymisation and pseudonymisation is practical, participatory and includes real-world use cases, following a CJEU ruling that clarified when pseudonymised data can be considered anonymous. They argue this is a key opportunity to create clear, operational frameworks that give companies legal certainty and support innovation across the EU economy.

Wall Street Wants To Know What The Programmatic Drama Is About.

Programmatic ad tech is tense right now because everyone is earning less, and the financial pressure is fuelling public finger-pointing between DSPs, SSPs and platforms like Google and The Trade Desk.  Several SSPs, including Magnite, PubMatic and Nexxen, reported sudden drops in spend from major DSPs in Q3, with many implying The Trade Desk’s OpenPath shift played a role.

At the same time, companies are using earnings calls to shape the narrative, redefining what counts as a DSP or reseller to position themselves more favourably. Despite the drama, the common thread is simple: margins are tightening, competition is intensifying and vendors are scrambling to defend their roles in a crowded, complex supply chain.

A Programmatic ‘Kill Switch’? Why Google’s ‘RTB Control’ Isn’t Sparking Panic.

Google has agreed to build an “RTB Control” tool that would let users strip all personal and pseudonymous data from bid requests, effectively acting as a kill switch for programmatic personalisation. The feature isn’t live, remains opt-in and won’t be finalised until at least early 2026, which is why the industry isn’t panicking yet.

Privacy experts say the opt-out nature and long timeline dampen urgency, though the settlement could inspire regulators in the US and EU to demand similar controls. While the tool sounds disruptive, many believe Google wouldn’t agree to it unless it knew the impact on its ad business would be minimal.

▸ Week 46

• - Publishers turn to paid audience acquisition to offset traffic declines.
• - IAB Tech Lab introduces the Agentic RTB Framework (ARTF) v1.0.
• - EU launches new investigation into Google’s ranking of news publishers.
• - Agentic bot traffic creates new headaches for publishers.
• - IAB Tech Lab unveils device attestation to combat CTV ad fraud.
• - Publishers shift from traffic anxiety to strategic focus in Q3 earnings.
• - First look: European Commission’s proposed digital law reforms.
• - New pay-per-article data platform offers publishers a 50% revenue share.
• - Daily Mail says Google’s AI Overviews have killed click-through rates.
• - Microsoft Prebid Adapter becomes available.
  

Media Briefing: Publishers turn to paid audience acquisition tactics to tackle traffic losses.

Publishers say the era of relying on “free” organic search traffic is fading fast, as Google volatility and AI tools cut deeply into referrals and shrink the audience they can monetise. To compensate, many are now turning to paid acquisition and traffic arbitrage, pulling marketing teams into broader audience-growth efforts even though the economics are often tight and unsustainable.

Execs admit they’re being pushed into buying traffic despite the long-term risk that AI search behaviour may eventually eliminate the need for users to click through at all. At the same time, AI is improving paid ad tools, allowing even smaller publishers to run low-budget campaigns with far better performance, helping offset some of the lost organic traffic.

IAB Tech Lab Announces Agentic RTB Framework (ARTF) v1.0 for Public Comment.

IAB Tech Lab has released the Agentic RTB Framework (ARTF) v1.0 for public comment, introducing a container-based architecture to speed up interoperability and data exchange across programmatic systems. The framework aims to cut bid request and response times by up to 80% by allowing DSPs, SSPs, agents, and enrichment tools to operate within the same data centre or virtual machine, reducing latency, compute costs, and energy use.

Industry leaders from Index Exchange, Chalice, and The Trade Desk say ARTF will unlock real-time agentic workflows, deeper bid enrichment, and more flexible, per-impression optimisation. ARTF also lays the groundwork for agentic trading standards like MCP and A2A communication, with public comments open until 15 January 2026. 

EU readies new investigation into Google over news publisher rankings.

Brussels is preparing a new DMA investigation into Google over allegations that it demotes publishers running sponsored or third-party promotional content, even as the US under Trump threatens retaliatory tariffs over EU digital enforcement. This adds to Google’s growing list of probes and multi-billion-euro fines, signalling the EU’s intent to keep tightening scrutiny of the company despite rising political tensions.

When bots look like buyers: agentic traffic causing new publisher headaches.

Agentic visitors, AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI browsers, are hitting publisher sites in growing numbers, but because they mimic human behaviour, measurement systems often flag them as invalid traffic. This is already spooking advertisers: companies like Salon have had buyers shut off ad spend entirely after IAS or DV reports showed spikes in what looked like fraudulent visits.

Publishers warn that the real threat isn’t the traffic itself but the loss of advertiser trust, as AI crawlers blend into logs, trigger IVT alarms, and make impressions look non-human. Vendors say bot-blocking isn’t enough and that the ecosystem may ultimately need regulation forcing non-human traffic to self-identify, or publishers risk escalating losses as AI scraping accelerates. 

Future of TV Briefing: WTF is IAB Tech Lab’s device attestation tactic to combat CTV ad fraud.

IAB Tech Lab has introduced device attestation, a new method to fight CTV device spoofing by having the device itself verify its authenticity rather than relying on inferred signals. The system uses tokens issued through the Privacy Pass protocol, allowing verification firms to confirm legitimacy without collecting personal data, though checks are sampled to avoid slowing down ad delivery.

Apple and Amazon have already committed support, and streaming apps will need to adopt the newest OM SDK to participate. While not a cure-all for ad fraud, the industry sees it as a significant upgrade that could scale as more device makers and platforms join. 

Publishers swap traffic angst for strategy in Q3 earnings.

Publishers used Q3 earnings calls to stress long-term growth strategies rather than complain about declining search traffic, with many leaning into video, direct audience channels, and AI licensing to reduce dependence on Google referrals. People Inc. was hit hardest with a steep drop in search-driven traffic and a 3% decline in digital ad revenue, while most other major publishers — including the New York Times, USA Today Co., Dow Jones, and Ziff Davis — posted YoY digital ad growth.

Several companies said they’re increasingly insulated from search volatility thanks to off-platform distribution, stronger direct traffic, and rising marketer demand. At the same time, AI licensing deals are quickly becoming a key revenue pillar, with People Inc., News Corp, and USA Today Co. all signing agreements with OpenAI, Microsoft, or Perplexity to monetise content as AI platforms shift users away from traditional click-through models.

An early look at the European Commission's proposed digital law.

The European Commission’s upcoming Digital Package will overhaul and simplify major EU digital laws, with changes spanning GDPR, ePrivacy, the Data Act and AI Act. Key proposals include a single incident-reporting portal, higher breach-reporting thresholds, relaxed cookie consent rules, EU-wide DPIA standards, narrower definitions of special-category data, and confirmation that AI model-training can rely on legitimate interest.

The package also introduces new exemptions for AI development, clarifies when privacy notices aren’t required, tightens the definition of personal data, and adds targeted carve-outs to cloud-switching rules while strengthening protections for trade secrets. Several laws will be repealed or merged — including the Data Governance Act, Free Flow of Non-Personal Data Regulation, and Platform-to-Business Regulation — with core provisions absorbed into updated frameworks.

Publishers offered 50% revenue share in pay-per-article data platform for PRs.

Newsworthy, a new NLA Media Access service, lets PR and communications firms buy per-article audience and engagement data from nearly 500 UK newsbrands, with publishers receiving half of the revenue and setting their own prices. The pilot aims to gauge demand before potentially shifting to subscriptions, offering PR teams clearer insight into the impact of earned media while strengthening ties with publishers.

Daily Mail says Google AI Overviews have killed click-throughs.

Daily Mail says Google AI Overviews slash clickthrough rates by 80–90% when they appear, but the overall traffic impact remains small because AIO rarely triggers on the breaking-news keywords the publisher relies on. Still, with Google surfacing more videos and modules and less traditional link traffic, the Mail is doubling down on direct audiences and subscriptions while closely watching regulator action on Google’s search practices.

Microsoft Prebid Adapter Now Available.

Microsoft has launched its new Prebid.js adapter for Monetise customers, replacing the older AppNexus adapter with a standard OpenRTB-based model. The update is expected to improve signal passthrough and increase spend opportunities, and publishers are encouraged to test and implement the new msft adapter. Source: Microsoft Advertising Newsletter.

▸ Week 45

• - Associated Press deal cements Microsoft’s quiet rise in AI licensing
• - News Corp explores multi-LLM licensing playbook
• - Magnite remains unbothered by The Trade Desk’s SSP policies
• - IP address match rates are a joke – and it’s no laughing matter
• - Before AI can think for Immediate Media, it needs clean data to think with
• - IAB Tech Lab plans a ‘Programmatic Governance Council’ amid transparency rift
• - ID5 buys TrueData, marking its first-ever acquisition
• - The Trade Desk and PubMatic are done pretending deal IDs work
  

Media Briefing: Associated Press deal cements Microsoft’s quiet rise in AI licensing.

Microsoft is expanding its AI content marketplace, signing licensing deals with major publishers like Associated Press, People Inc., and USA Today Co. The initiative aims to create a pay-per-use system that compensates publishers fairly for their content while allowing them input in shaping the framework.

Industry leaders see Microsoft’s move as a positive shift toward respecting copyright and establishing a sustainable model for AI-driven content use, though the long-term success of this model remains uncertain. Strategically, Microsoft’s push is seen as an effort to strengthen ties with media companies and secure valuable content for its AI tools, positioning itself competitively against Google.

News Corp explores multi-LLM licensing playbook.

News Corp is exploring a multi-licensing strategy with several large language model providers, following its $250 million deal with OpenAI in 2024, as part of CEO Robert Thomson’s “woo and sue” approach — partnering with compliant AI firms while taking legal action against those using content without permission. The company is reportedly in talks with Google and Apple, aiming to balance collaboration with protection of its intellectual property amid growing AI-driven content use.

This shift reflects a broader industry trend toward non-exclusive, pay-per-use licensing models that allow publishers to monetise their data across multiple AI platforms. Meanwhile, News Corp’s lawsuit against Perplexity and participation in industry initiatives like IAB Tech Lab’s CoMP highlight publishers’ push to build frameworks that define how AI systems can legally and fairly access their content. 

Magnite Remains Unbothered By The Trade Desk’s SSP Policies.

Magnite reported strong Q3 results, with revenue up 11% YoY to $179.5 million, driven by growth in CTV (up 18%) and audio formats. CEO Michael Barrett downplayed any rivalry with The Trade Desk, praising its efforts to clean up the ad supply chain and noting that Magnite’s preferred supply path relationships have mitigated potential fallout from TTD’s OpenPath changes.

The company is also expanding its AI strategy through its acquisition of Streamr.ai and integration of new collaborative AI frameworks like AdCP into its products. However, Magnite is taking a tougher stance against Google, having filed an antitrust lawsuit alleging anti-competitive behaviour that harms independent ad tech players. 

IP Address Match Rates Are a Joke – And It’s No Laughing Matter.

A new Truthset report found that IP-to-email matches are accurate only 16% of the time and IP-to-postal matches just 13%, exposing major flaws in the data linking advertisers use for targeting and measurement. The study revealed huge inconsistencies between data vendors, widespread use of outdated or padded data, and poor representation of newer IP formats like IPv6.

Experts warn that advertisers prioritising scale over accuracy are fueling the problem, with many unaware of how unreliable their matching data really is. Unless the industry adopts standardisation, transparency, and collaboration, open-internet advertising risks ceding even more ground to walled gardens like Google and Meta, which don’t face these data quality issues. 

Before AI can think for Immediate Media, it needs clean data to think with.

Immediate Media is prioritising clean, unified data as the foundation for its AI strategy, focusing next year on improving data quality across subscriptions, audience, and e-commerce sources. The company has built a central data platform to power AI agents, starting with tools that help its sales team respond faster to briefs and aiming to expand into subscription growth and retention.

Its long-term goal is an AI-powered subscription model that predicts user behaviour and personalises engagement, similar to the Financial Times’ approach. While AI will support analytics and workflow automation, Immediate Media remains committed to human-led creativity in branded content, with most of its workforce now actively using AI tools.

Ad Tech Briefing: IAB Tech Lab plans a ‘Programmatic Governance Council’ amid transparency rift.

IAB Tech Lab is forming a Programmatic Governance Council to create clearer rules for transparency, auction integrity, and data standardisation across the open internet. The move follows growing friction between buy- and sell-side players after Prebid’s August update to how TIDs are handled, which reignited long-standing tensions over control and visibility in programmatic auctions.

Recent closed-door meetings among major ad tech companies explored a “grand bargain” — including single bid requests, multiple DSP bids, and simplified pricing — to restore balance between both sides. The new council aims to formalise collaboration between agencies, publishers, DSPs, and SSPs, ensuring shared technical standards and a sustainable framework for open-internet advertising.

Alt Identity Provider ID5 Buys TrueData, Marking Its First-Ever Acquisition.

ID5 has acquired TrueData to strengthen its position as a unified identity provider and tackle the fragmentation of digital identity across devices, platforms, and data sources. The merger combines ID5’s cross-device ID graph with TrueData’s online and offline data assets, expanding recognition to 1.5 billion users and 665 million households, while boosting ID5’s US presence and revenue by up to 40%.

The Trade Desk And PubMatic Are Done Pretending Deal IDs Work.

Despite the perception that programmatic advertising runs on automation, most PMP deals and deal IDs still rely on manual negotiations over calls and emails, leading to inefficiencies and limited scalability. To address this, The Trade Desk and PubMatic have launched an API-based integration using TTD’s Price Discovery and Provisioning (PDP) API, designed to standardise and automate deal-based transactions.

The new system introduces “commitment deals,” where budgets and campaign terms are contractually locked in from the start, ensuring both parties deliver on agreed terms. This initiative aims to eliminate fragmented communication, improve transparency, and make deal ID campaigns more reliable, particularly in fast-growing channels like CTV and streaming audio.