Pub.Call: Need revenue now? Make Q2 your new Q4

BY LIZ MOOREHEAD, BEELER.TECH

Publishers don’t have the luxury of waiting for a market rebound, a cleaner AI story, or a perfect internal roadmap. The theme of our recent Pub.Call was much more urgent than that. If revenue is under pressure now, then the work is to find ideas that can be launched in days or weeks, not months, and to make each visit to your site work harder than it does today.

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Rob joined guest speakers Dan Rua (Admiral), Jason White (Mula), Andy Batkin (Duration Media LLC) and Brendan Ripp (Pushly) in forming a practical exercise: trace the revenue path from discovery, to session depth, to loyalty. And determine what can be improved quickly enough to show up in Q2.

Stop waiting for traffic to save you

First up was to look at the kinds of moves that can be made quickly whether that means improving refresh economics, adding e-commerce, building first-party signals, or keeping more people moving from one page to the next. That urgency also made the conversation broader than a standard web monetization talk. 

One publisher in digital out-of-home described sitting on “billions of unmonetized impressions and looking for nonstandard ways to activate them outside of the usual SSP routes”. Another described the more familiar web problem of trying to grow revenue after stricter CMP enforcement, privacy pressure, legal hesitation around identity solutions, and the long tail of cookie uncertainty have all made the old playbook less dependable.

As one publisher pointed out, “Revenue opportunities often get stuck because they become multi-departmental, and different teams look at the same idea through very different lenses. The clearest advice was to get closer to the CFO, because they’re often the person most focused on the revenue gap, and most able to champion ideas which need cross-functional backing.

Make every visit earn more

One route discussed was to get more value from the impressions you already have. Andy’s argument was that refresh should not be treated as a passive decline curve. If a follow-on impression is likely to command a lower CPM, then there’s room to intervene with highly viewable inventory, unique demand, and a refresh decision based on whether the replacement can beat the publisher’s existing economics. The appeal is obvious – no extra visitor acquisition, no major dev lift, and a model designed to leave the publisher alone if the uplift isn’t there.

A second route was to stop thinking in terms of isolated page RPM and start thinking in terms of revenue per session. That was the core of Jason’s presentation, and it reveals a wider shift in publisher strategy. When traffic is down and every page has to do more work, you can no longer drop in one more unit and hope it performs. Instead, you can use AI to decide whether the next-best move is e-commerce, vertical video, polling, native recommendation, or the next article. Then keep learning from the response so that more sessions turn into more page views, and eventually more revenue.

Brendan also made a case for owned audience relationships. Search is less dependable, social is rented land, and email is crowded to the point of exhaustion for many users. Web push offers another route back to the homepage, the subscription page, the affiliate page, the sponsored page, or the archive story that still has value but is no longer being surfaced at the right time. This is important because the strategy isn’t about traffic, but instead about sending the right person to the right page. This supports both editorial priorities and revenue goals, and does it in a way that can adapt as KPIs shift from programmatic, to subscriptions, to branded content, and back again.

Turn friction into revenue

Dan’s contribution pushed that idea further by focusing on the on-site journey itself. The argument was that publishers often treat losses as if they’re unavoidable when they’re actually recoverable. Ad blocking, non-consent, exits, fragmented tags, and weak conversion paths all reduce yield before a publisher ever gets a chance to monetize the visit properly. In that framing, the quickest win is to measure the losses first, then switch on the recovery tactics that fit the business. That could mean ad block recovery, payer consent, exit recovery, an ad-free subscription path, or a conversational AI layer built on top of existing content.

That also brought a more realistic privacy point into the discussion. In the US, “consent or pay” still feels early for many publishers. In Europe, it’s much more familiar, and is actually expected in many cases. So not every tactic works the same way in every market. Publishers should stop letting compliance conversations flatten into a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Some ideas raise clear privacy questions, and some don’t. Some are local-market plays, and some travel well. The job is to know the difference, then move faster on the ones that are already viable.

By the end of the discussion, a practical sequence had emerged:

• First, get people to your site without depending on Google to do the heavy lifting forever. 
• Next, keep them there with more relevant content, better recirculation, or commerce units that fit the context. 
• Then recover the value that’s being lost through ad blockers, non-consent, exits, or weak conversion paths. 
• After that, create a reason for the next visit, whether that’s push, email, login, or a more personalized experience. 

Some publishers are already extending that thinking into online video and CTV, where product recognition and shoppable moments could create entirely new commercial paths. Others are finding simpler wins through SSO prompts that encourage visitors to log in and hand over an email address at surprisingly high volume.

Publishers who make progress in this market will be the ones who can connect the dots faster – discovery, engagement, monetization, loyalty – and then remove the internal blockers that keep obvious revenue opportunities sitting on the sidelines. If Q2 really is the new Q4, then the job now is to stop waiting for a cleaner future and start acting on the revenue paths that are already in front of you.

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