Above the Fold: October 13, 2025

by

Above the Fold: October 13, 2025

BY ROB BEELER

Please note that this information is confidential and intended for the internal use of our partners only.

Community Feed

  • AdTech AdTalk with Jeff Green: https://www.youtube.com/live/iAvdjGl-Vfw
  • Databeat.io report: Across around 50k US publisher domains, there was a net +29k change in ads.txt lines — slower growth than September but still trending positive. Interestingly, most of that came from mid-tier publishers (ranks 501–2000), who added about 14.8k new lines. Link
  • Spotify announced that its Megaphone-hosted publishers will gain access to direct-sold campaign and private marketplace trafficking using Spotify ad tech by mid-2026, offering more monetization control for podcast publishers: Link
  • AppLovin probed by US SEC over data-collection practices, Bloomberg News reports
    • The whole business has been highly sus as the kids say.
    • indeed. I can’t wait to see the argument that reverse engineering user on the buy side is totally normal and legal and not violating privacy law or the agreements they have with their partners.
  • Burt’s September open auction benchmarks report is out! Display and video CPMs increased compared to August. YoY, video CPM went down. Notably, two advertisers achieved a significant >120% increase in video spending MoM. Discover these insights and more in the full report: Link
  • Hi friends! Sharing Seedtag’s The PubWay Podcast latest episode with special guest, Jared Siegal. Always fun when we get to bring on familiar faces to the show. We touch upon leveraging AI/LLMs (shocking I know) across the spectrum, what is needed to build innovative monetization strategies, and why publisher control matters now more than ever. Link

Events

  • October 12. Intentional October Wellness Reset – imwell.co
  • October 14: DoubleVerify is hosting a happy hour for its entire community in New York
  • Webinar: Monetization That Matters – Premium Demand for Publishers | October 22, 2025 | 5:00 PM CEST – Publishers, are your ad slots really being valued at their full potential? Join Magali Quentel-Reme (CEO & Co-Founder, Opti Digital) and Olly Aulakh (CRO, Opti Digital) for a 45-minute webinar that cuts to the heart of premium monetization. Register now
  • Advance Women: Unmuted in NYC on 10/28! October 28, 5:30 – 7:30 pm
  • Calling all adtech experts! Do you think you’ve got what it takes to champion your sector in front of a live audience? Then the Fired Up 2 event is the one for you… Earlier this summer, we kicked off your events season with a bang, introducing our first-ever Fired Up, where our experts took to the stage to debate what’s hot and what’s hotter in adtech right now, in front of an elite judging panel. Think you could win over the judges? Pitch your place today for a chance to be a part of the hottest event of the golden quarter… Submit your topic here – Save the date: Wednesday 26th November, 12-3 pm

AI Publisher Response

Scott Messer has been busy.LinkedIn Post –AdExchanger Post – and Digiday post. I think this is important for everyone to look at and socialize within your company – someone must be thinking through your external AI strategy (external meaning the LLMs/platforms and not internal tools).Generative AI Licensing Matrix

The IAB has created the Content Monetization Protocols (CoMP) for the AI Working Group (Link) – I highly recommend joining this committee if you can or have someone who can. In fact, they are looking for publishers to help define the scope and need feedback this week or early next week. Take a look at the scope of the project, and if you have ideas of things they should address, here is a form by which to do so. The IAB is going to move forward because they have to. You can contribute with your ideas. Please submit something. If you don’t feel comfortable, share your ideas with Beeler.Tech and we will assist.

AI Just Wouldn’t Understand: Human-Crafted Quick Summaries of this Week’s Discussions

(In other words, we manually compiled this list.)

  • Index Exchange dynamic take rates were discussed again this week, but with some people sharing positive results. Higher revenues and yield. They’ve been open to auditing log files. Quote: “My overall take rate has gone down to less than the contracted take rate as a result of this change.”
  • Amazon continues to baffle everyone. Some saw all activity stop over the weekend, only to start up again. One theory suggests spending around Prime Days, but that doesn’t seem to correlate with actual shutdowns. 
  • Amazon also alerted some people that “Starting October 30th, content that cannot be crawled will see reduced spend as it will only be available to a limited pool of advertisers.”
  • Reports of CTV video ads that look like VOD or live content, and then get interrupted by the real advertiser. The person reporting it can’t pinpoint the specific DSP. 

OneTrust Configuration Changes

I want to run a report to see if my updated implementation of OneTrust is impacting revenue. What are some of the reports you would run to see if there has been any material change? 

  • Start with GAM Serving Restriction trends, validate against ad request counts and revenue efficiency (revenue per request), and cross-check with OneTrust consent rates. Add tracking for consent behavior and model seasonal impacts before attributing revenue changes to OneTrust.

Questions In Search of Answers/More Discussion

  • We have a lot of native creatives in GAM that we’d like to be able to regularly bulk export. We haven’t found an easy way, but it appears that we can extract all the previewURLs from the Creative Service API and then crawl these pages (which contain the assets in an HTML table) to retrieve the assets. Question: Is there an easier way or any issues with this approach?
  • Has anyone been pitched on or integrated Magnite Link? The program is a little murky to me, but it seems to be a combo of “optimizations” including audience segments (for Magnite) and flooring/optimizations for other PreBid partners.
  • We are seeing buyers who manage their buying by aggregating deals into a single line in their campaigns. As a result, our inventory sometimes takes a disproportionately high share of the budget, due to the DSP’s algorithm optimizing in this way. The agency solution? Let’s take out that inventory altogether. We are considering sending less inventory to the deals/seats in question. Has anyone ever encountered this type of issue? Have you thought of other potential solutions?
  • If Amazon, as a DSP, is expanding so rapidly, why are these publisher shutdowns happening now?
  • I wanted to post a discussion point from Base Camp here to solicit more ideas: User Acquisition – What is the best way to get started?
  • We’ve worked with Google and LiveIntent for newsletter ad delivery, but have experienced mixed results. I’d be interested in hearing if anyone has had success with other platforms and could share their recommendations. Thanks!
  • Are any of you familiar with https://www.elcanotek.com/?
  • Does anyone use a company to enhance their subscription lists and web visitors with additional data points such as HHI, affinities, and demographics? If so, do you have any suggestions/recommendations?