Above the Fold: December 15, 2025

BY ROB BEELER

Please note that this information is confidential and intended for the internal use of our partners only. The Above the Fold Report is an amalgamation of the discussions taking place within the Beeler.Tech universe. Much of what is presented is based on conversations held behind closed doors within the last week. The topics will range from the existential threats to publishers down to questions about how to use a specific feature in an ad server. We believe that if you are a publisher or someone who works with publishers, all of these provide opportunities to help or learn. The report’s format changes as the conversations change.

Community Feed

Burt’s November open auction benchmarks report is out! Both Display and Video CPMs increased MoM and YoY. Notably, three advertisers across Display and Video achieved a significant >150% MoM increase in spending. Discover these insights and more in the full report: https://www.burtintelligence.com/burt-benchmarks-monthly-report

Events

December 17th, 11 am EST – Adomik Webinar: Meet the New AI Partner for Publishers: In our upcoming webinar, we’ll show you what makes Adomik’s agentic AI different: purpose-built for publisher operations, trained on the realities of yield, performance, and revenue. Link

CES and Desist

(by no means an exhaustive list – we’re sharing what has been posted in the Slack)

Jan 6: Seedtag happy hour – Link
Jan 6: Boostr happy hour – Link

What to do about Resellers?

This will be a strain to summarize all the points of this conversation so far, and since we have not all this information has been cross-pollinated between our Slacks, it will continue into this week. I’ll start by saying I’ve been frustrated by the lack of progress in identifying which demand partners provide revenue via ads.txt line items. We’ve only had a few contributors. So I asked why this isn’t working. 60% of respondents said they just don’t have time. 23% said they hadn’t gotten to it. Conclusion: we’re all a tad busy. But the poll set in motion a ton of discussion, and I’m going to hit some highlights here while working on a larger representation of this conversation.

Some publishers have gone so far as to remove ALL reseller lines and didn’t see a noticeable drop in revenue.
Another removed most reseller lines. Overall revenue remained the same, though some SSPs’ share dropped significantly. It then became a conversation with each SSP about whether lines needed to be re-added in or if the SSP was dropped.
The experience of revenue by reseller line reporting from SSPs is clearly a mixed bag. “It was like pulling teeth, and we’ve been slowly working to remove those lines.” Where others say they task their SSPs with providing revenue forecasts by line without pushback.
One approach offered was allowing a partner to prioritize 6 to 7 (six, seven, six, seven) reseller lines, which the SSP can change as needed.
Publishers would like to see this information available in their UIs rather than having to ask for it. In this conversation, only Content Ignite was cited for providing the data in their UI, though I believe Index Exchange does as well.
The conversation then turned to the point that we would want to have validation of the data anyway – it’s not enough for SSPs to self-report. This lead to a call to look at the oRTB spec and see if schain could be returned.
An important related point was made that we, as publishers, have zero visibility into what happens to the original bid request, especially when it goes down multiple supply paths.

We had someone share a much more strategic vision for their approach (paraphrased): The value of traditional resellers’ short-term revenue comes at the expense of long-term benefit. The result is that it doesn’t (typically) provide unique demand and instead creates duplication of inventory requests, which Jounce has called the “biggest risk to the supply chain.” Essentially, it’s gaming the system.

This led to the question: Do resellers offer any real value? I posed this to our community Slack, and the following is a summary of the many responses received from partners in the space:

QPS throttling limits the number of bid requests from DIRECT partners, and so RESELLER increases the chance of getting a bid. However, there is no way to deduplicate those two types of bids.
One SSP said that each reseller line has PMP demand behind it and that reseller lines are tied to curation elements. This partner provides % of revenue per line.
One SSP pointed out that they do provide unique spend through reseller lines, in part because of ad formats (such as Native or Video) or agency partnerships. This SSP also provides revenue per line.
Another SSP also mentioned that some agency clients set up deals with specific partners, and the reseller lines are needed. “Strategic reselling” was mentioned.

I feel a much bigger discussion brewing…

This Week’s Top Community Topics (Non-Agentic Advertising)

Some summaries are AI-assisted to keep Rob on point, but all summaries are human-reviewed.

How do you assess SSP Market Share by Geo? Tools like Prebid adapter uptake, Jounce, Pixalate, Adomik, and OpenSincera were mentioned, but don’t provide the level of detail one publisher was looking for. To date, the publisher has been reaching out to publishers in a specific geographic marketplace and has had some successes. Using market share as a proxy, however, has been a mixed bag.

User Experience: I like this way of thinking – a site change is an opportunity to speak with your audience in a way we often don’t (but should): “Publishers: if you put in the work to modernize your ad layouts this year, message your readers with adblockers to let them know that more respectful formats await, should they choose to support your site again. Make the most of your new user experience – restoring your ability to monetize a percentage of these visitors is worth it.” – Justin Wohl, Aditude (LinkedIn post)

Many pubs work hard on their ad experience, yet blockers have no idea unless you tell them (remember, they have a blocker on, so your experience could be top decile and they’d never know). When you tell them and ask for their support in a human way, they will reciprocate. It’s a great example of how pub:visitor reciprocal relationships start. In fact, we published an early case study on this with CBA. Not only did blockers support pubs who engaged them to allowlist as a baseline, but they also got a +28% lift in baseline recovery rate when mentioning their work and commitment to quality ad experiences as part of the ask.

Compliant Global: Lots of feelings in the publisher community about Compliant Global. To summarize some of the main concerns: they scan publisher sites, sell the data to buyers, but publishers have to pay to get access to how the scoring is done (which isn’t unlike other services, but I digress). “If this were a service for publishers and not made available to buyers, I’d be cool with it.”

The conversation then turned into how they measure. Some publishers report different scores across sites with the same configuration. One reported that the ICO had given them the all clear sign, but Compliant said they didn’t have sufficient consent notices and choices. They dock pubs for not having a consent modal across the US, even though it’s not legally required. Pubs get docked for “piggyback” tags, which might be valid and in some cases required. They can’t verify what happens in the ad server and if I’m serving non-personalized ads. Why does the number of tags matter? Why draw the line where they do?

Infolinks: someone asked for feedback on Infolinks. Several opinions shared: Two pubs mentioned negative experiences from years ago and turned them off, but recent feedback is they provide decent ad quality and are easy to work with. They are not an SSP in the traditional sense. Credible and paid on time.

Human-Hallucinations-Only Summary of This Week’s Topics

In other words, this is manually compiled because we believe you deserve more than “good enough.”

Agentic Advertising: “We are building our agents with Media Mint. It integrates with all the platforms we use.”
This is publicly available but appears to have been released w/ no comms: DV360 and Google Adwords are now possible to floor in GAM UPR.
Another week, another report of Amazon issues. The publisher configured sellers.json properly, but is still getting errors.

Anyone?

Questions asked in the community that went unanswered or deserve more attention.

Anyone working with Decide Technologies? “I have worked with them in the past and have been planning to test them again on-site. They’re great for additional incremental revenue.”

How do you assess SSP Market Share by Geo?

Did anyone have issues with Apple News recording clicks for campaigns delivered via GAM from 11/24 to 12/8? We saw some big outages in clicks and have no clue what is happening. Apple says they know there’s a known issue on iOS 26.1, but in GAM, I can’t report for anything past 26. We are stumped and have some really mad clients.

Does anyone know of a good resource for a webinar-style video that unpacks the various elements of the oRTB spec (like line by line in the JSON)? The Jounce webinars have been great for general training of the broader team, but it doesn’t really get into the nuts and bolts of the spec.