Above the Fold: December 8, 2025

by

Above the Fold: December 8, 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.

Quotes of the Week

“With all due respect to the IAB, where is the agenda item about helping publishers defend themselves from content theft by LLMs?” – Scott Messer on LinkedIn.

“I know this is an old topic, but it came back to mind when AdBlock Plus asked me to take a premium subscription. Why is it that a company can generate revenue by blocking another company from generating revenue for the services they deliver?”

Community Feed

Events

  • On December 10, at 10 AM ET, Tom Triscari (Advertising Economic Forum) is hosting a live webinar with Rui de Freitas, CEO/cofounder of C Wire, to unpack MatchPersona. This AI persona engine turns strategic audience definitions into transparent, cookieless media activation. Registration
  • Everyone Wants More Leads | December 11, 12:00 pm ET | Virtual Roundtable | Pubs Only
  • Camp.Fire: Jounce Seller Sentiment Survey Readout | December 17, 12:00 pm ET Register here

 

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. 

Prebid Cache for video ads is going away: From a Patrick McCann LinkedIn Post: if you’re a publisher using Prebid for video ads, you probably rely on the free Prebid Cache run by Microsoft. That will no longer exist in February, and you have a few options. Stand up your own, find a vendor for this and reconfigure all your gam creatives (I know of none so far), stop working with Prebid for video, or implement local caching (and until we solve https://lnkd.in/ew8UhB4f, not use AdX anymore). We’re working to get 14014 solved, but no promises. I recommend local caching as the goal, with standing up another prebid cache as the fallback plan if you can’t get that to work for you. Local caching performs better and requires no GAM changes.

Are flooring strategies adjustments needed? “Has anyone changed their flooring strategy in response to TTD shifting spend to OpenPath? Even though TTD doesn’t respond to floors sent by SSPs, the SSPs still set a competitive baseline price to win an impression. Theoretically, TTD shifting spend to OpenPath eliminates any of the SSP’s added value. My floors may be softer than necessary now because we’ve relied on SSP flooring to maintain rates.”

Has anyone been using Gzip Compression for Bid Requests and seeing benefits? (We come across this feature as we upgraded Prebid.js to v10.16.0). Only PubMatic and Criteo have adopted this feature so far, though more may follow. Also worth noting: the Gzip configuration is handled within the adapter code itself, so no config from the pub side. I don’t know how much of the performance impact is relevant to the publisher vs the SSPs.

Compliant Global: advertisers looking to prioritize data integrity: AdExchanger Article. This is part of a rollout in which the WFA recommends that agencies/brands start using the Compliant Global Data Integrity Index. I suspect that you’ll hear DII come up next year. Publishers can view their score for free using the Brand Safety Institute utility portal, and Compliant Global also provides access to the scores (Link).  

Lots of app interstitial conversations: A non-gaming app is considering running full-blocking interstitials. Feedback was to do it only in natural transitions, or you will see an immediate drop in DAU. Rewarded ads combined with subscription paywalls might be the better option. 

A separate conversation focused on frequency capping interstitial units across multiple bidders. 

There is debate about whether integrating Facebook as a demand source was worthwhile. The key point is that iOS is a bigger struggle because of addressability.

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.”

  • Q4 trends: “Cyber Monday was just a normal Monday.” 
  • Some testing and questions of the Prebid Server on AWS.
  • Speaking of Amazon, there have been some reports of broken reporting since November 26th. 
  • Adblock solutions can make it harder to troubleshoot bad ads, depending on who you use.

Anyone?

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

Has anyone worked with any good DCO/Targeting Optimization vendors?

We want skippable or max 15-second video ads. Has anyone figured out a way to request bids for videos of these conditions without making two separate requests (and unnecessarily doubling your number of bid requests)? In the oRTB spec, we haven’t found a way to say ‘max 15 sec or skippable’. We either say ‘maxDuration: 15’ or ‘skippable: true’ (but those combine with and, not with or).

 Has anyone heard anything about the new law in Washington state that requires sales tax on advertising services (starting 10/1/25)? If so, are you adjusting your systems to pay this out for Washington revenue/impressions? Our finance team is asking if this is generally being adhered to across other web publishers. It would be quite a bit of work to pay out tax on Washington-specific revenue.

Has anyone found a partner that can do a decent job of flagging datacenters/invt pre-ad call?