Above the Fold: December 22, 2025

by

Above the Fold: December 22, 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.

Call To Action

  • Evan Thor posted on LinkedIn and asked: “What if we force the final schain object from the oRTB request to flow back to the publisher in the bid response?” It’s already gotten a decent response and should be further debated on LinkedIn or within the publisher community. Speak up.

Quotes of the Week

  • Don’t advertisers make their own standards bodies and self-regulate? Can’t we do the same thing? Come up with a panel of industry leaders, brand the organization, and say this is how publishers do things?

Community Feed

Very useful information from Playwire recently about crawlers:

• The Ad Tech Crawlers You Should Never Block

• How to Block AI Bots with robots.txt

• Should Publishers Be Blocking AI Crawlers

• AI Scraping vs. Traditional SEO Crawling

Events

  • Play hoops at CES. January 7th at UNLV. Link

Rob’s Recommended RESELLER Rules

These are based on conversations that have spanned months in the community and aim to codify a consistent strategy to improve the ecosystem for publishers.

  1. Every line in your ads.txt needs to justify its existence. Assume that RESELLER lines are not in your best interest until proven otherwise.
  2. Work with the minimum number of demand partners possible for your business.
  3. Work with the minimum number of RESELLER lines possible for your business.
  4. Support people/projects to help clean up the programmatic ecosystem. 
  5. What you are looking for is demand partners to use RESELLER lines to drive unique demand, not just increase duplication or play other games. Long-term, these games hurt you and hurt everyone else.
  6. Assume all demand partners can provide revenue by ads.txt line, and before you add a RESELLER line, request a forecast. If you are already running RESELLER lines for someone, ask for the revenue breakdown. Based on what a few people have shared in this group, the data is available upon request. Request it. 
  7. While you’re at it, request that the information be available in their UI or API. To date, I’ve only heard that Content Ignite and Index Exchange provide it in their UI.

Additional RESELLER Insights

This is based on comments based on the guidelines (they really aren’t rules), Rob provided:

  • We often find they don’t respect our blocklists, and that is more of an issue for us than the payment breakdowns. It’s a requirement to work with us.
  • Another requirement is that the vendors cannot refresh ads. It’s not differentiated demand – it’s ad stuffing. 
  • 2026 is likely to be brutal for the SSP/reseller space, as the open web supply shrinks from search being shut off and The Trade Desk gets even more aggressive in cracking down on bid duplication.  If DV360 also starts to care about bid duplication, SSPs/resellers are really in a bad spot.
  • In preparing for the Chris Kane call later, he talks about the number of SSPs that don’t have direct integrations with DSPs. That’s a tell-tale sign that you need to decide whether they will add value or just duplicate bids.
  • There is a finite amount of DSPs and an even smaller amount of DSPs that matter. The first question should be – “How are you connected to DV360? Directly or via Bidswitch?

This probably isn’t the perfect analogy, but I like tying ad-tech topics to real-world situations. To me, this is a lot like food delivery.  If I owned a pizza shop, the best way to guarantee my pizza arrives hot and fresh would be to use my own team of drivers; people held to my standards and accountable for the customer experience. If I didn’t want the overhead of maintaining a whole team, I could supplement with third-party drivers or hand the entire operation off to Grubhub. But the moment I do that, I lose control over how my product shows up at the customer’s door. Maybe the pizza is a bit colder after riding around in a car for an extra 30 minutes, but perhaps that tradeoff is worth the savings.  Now imagine Grubhub then outsources part of its operation to yet another service because they can make a few extra dollars. That doesn’t help me as the pizza shop owner. In fact, it almost guarantees my 16″ Traditional Pie shows up as a rubbery ring — but hey, Grubhub made an extra buck, right?  The biggest problem is that I have no idea who these new drivers even are. They have no connection to my shop, no investment in my brand, and no reason to care how my pizza reaches the customer. And because this doesn’t happen every single time, it’s hard to know whether there’s a consistent negative impact overall. All I know is that I get a weekly check from Grubhub, with a few clawbacks sprinkled in.

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. 

SSP market share by market: conversation continued from the prior week, with a request to understand what publishers are doing and which demand partners are best to work with in each marketplace. There are benchmarking solutions (Adomik and Burt, for example), but the publisher is looking for even deeper insights. Relevant Digital has offered assistance to publishers seeking more information. As publishers look for any levers to pull to increase revenue, this is an opportunity to help.

Keeping an eye out for clawbacks: A pub asked whether a partner was showing signs of trouble due to late payments. Others weighed in that they haven’t had any issues (which is why we aren’t mentioning their name). It is a reminder to keep an eye on payments. 

UGC content under greater scrutiny: Amazon started in the summer and hasn’t stopped with turning publishers off, but it looks like other demand partners are blocking the delivery of ads near UGC content. 

Amazon Double Whammy: A publisher reporting that they stopped getting bids and then a cancellation notice due to inactivity, with no ability to appeal. 

Unsafe content kill switches: Sparked by a question about how, as a publisher, to prevent ads from serving on unsafe content on their own site, a few thoughts shared included a kill switch within the CMS to prevent ads from being called, using a context tool within your CMS, and then serving only house ads to those content segments. 

Building agents a barrier: Based on a poll conducted several weeks ago, a pub weighed in, saying it makes sense that large pubs will have the resources to build sales agents: “The economics work for them.” However, for mid-size and smaller pubs, bandwidth is a fundamental constraint. It’s more than just dev resources; it’s the training and evaluation process. It’s expensive and time-consuming. They suggest pooling resources wherever possible. 

Compliant Global: This discussion has been ongoing for a few weeks regarding their service that indexes publishers based on privacy compliance.  Some additional pushback is that so much of what is happening once a user consents or fails to opt out, that publishers can’t control, and at the same time, creates very little risk to the advertiser. 

Additional discussion reflected on publishers’ responsibility to act as trustworthy stewards of user data and the broader consequences when that trust is broken. Participants emphasized the importance of investing in robust internal compliance processes and being selective in choosing partners, noting that consent is a privilege that requires adherence to publisher standards. It was suggested to discuss further the challenges of making privacy compliance commercially differentiating. 

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.”

  • Google Ad Experience Report flagged a publisher’s Google-approved web interstitials as pop-up violations. A new trigger based on “end of article” was the culprit, as it was happening on pages with infinite scroll. 
  • Following pricing rule changes within GAM, one person has reported declining performance. 
  • D-Shortiez continues to hit publishers, and they need updated parameters to protect users. Beeswax was explicitly called out this week as a source of the bad ads.

Conversation Starters

Does anyone use Mintegral?

This article makes no sense to me. The overall cost to an advertiser for OpenPath is easy to understand and lower than any other path using a traditional SSP, which typically takes 10-20%. It’s as close to handing your money directly to the publisher as it gets in the programmatic world. What am I missing? Media buyers shift spend from The Trade Desk’s OpenPath over transparency concerns.

We are seeing more and more 720 ⨯ 1280 video ads crammed into 300×250 ad sizes coming through Adx. What setting can be used in GAM to counter this, or floor it separately?

You can now update your pricing rules to target specific bidders/buyers.  It looks as though existing rules should continue to behave the same way, but I saw some worrisome performance yesterday among some of my publishers, and I’m figuring out why.  Anyone else investigating a drop?

Does anyone have recommendations for tools that scan for unsafe content and would allow us to prevent ad tags on those pages?

One of my partners recently sent me this summary for a list of explicit opt-in regimes: https://education.securiti.ai/certifications/privacyops/consent/opt-in-opt-out-countries/ It lists countries such as India, Argentina, and Japan as explicit opt-in regimes/countries requiring a CMP. I do NOT believe this to be the case. How are the rest of you navigating this?

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)?

Open Sincera, anyone working with their solution? If so, are there actionable insights that inform changes and drive more revenue?