Above the Fold: January 12, 2026

by

Above the Fold: January 12, 2026

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. 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

Events

TD Foundation 20th Annual Holiday Cocktails Gala – January 22, 6:00 pm ET – New York Athletic Club: Celebrate our 2025 successes and discuss how the TD Foundation has been helping the children and families of wounded warriors and fallen heroes at the 20th Annual TD Foundation Holiday Cocktail Event! Register now!

Hélène Parker’s Reach and Frequency: Learn Programmatic Advertising at Your Own Pace: Featuring an incredibly detailed 6-month course, private coaching, and over 19.5 hours of video content, there’s never been a better time to learn programmatic advertising. If you add the coupon code earlybird25, you get a 25% discount! Join the course here!

Camp.Fire: Prioritizing the right topics and voices in 2026 –  January 21, 12:00 pm ET |Virtual: It’s a new year, time to start planning! This Camp.Fire lets you shape our focus, so we build the discussions you actually need with the right people. Two main topics: How much should we talk about the world as it exists today vs. planning for the future? (Put another way: How much time do we spend on AI and things coming vs. what is on our plate today? What helps you the most?) Who are the most important people for us to talk to? (Specifically for Base.Camp and Navigator. Are agencies really relevant? Brands? SSPs? DSPs?)

Optable Connect 2026 – February 24 – Toronto: The advertising industry is being rewritten. Again. Third-party signals are disappearing. AI agents are entering the workflow. And the gap between organizations that are ready and those still catching up is widening fast. Optable Connect Toronto is where executive leaders across publishers, platforms, advertisers, and agencies come together to get ahead of what’s next. Head to this link to learn more. Or skip the line and register here!

This Week’s Top Community Topics

It’s the start of the year, and so we saw more questions than conversation this past week, but you can see some themes emerging right off the bat. 

The question that will define much of the year: “Curious, which role/business unit primarily owns AI strategy across your company today? If you had to choose a single owner where accountability ultimately lands, would it sit under revenue ops, product, tech, audience, etc.?”  <- first time this year this question is being asked. Not the last. This needs to be answered by every publisher.

ADCP: “Even for large publishers like us, the idea of building seller agents internally is also difficult. Getting engineering work prioritized, etc., and fighting for your spot can be exhausting. We want to move quickly on this front, which is why we outsourced the agents. We will have a few pieces that are in use from internal sources.”

The Trade Desk OpenAds Announcement: The Trade Desk Announces First Wave of OpenAds Publishing Partners – Supporting a Healthier Digital Media Supply Chain – Some discussion amongst publishers as to why some big-name publishers are going this direction. There are definitely some pubs that are vehemently against going this route, but others see it as an incremental revenue stream. “We’re treating it like how most run TAM alongside Prebid. Only difference is rather than favoring Amazon DSP, we’d be favoring TTD.” One strategy is to look at OpenAds as a Prebid Server endpoint, which was cited as much easier than working with TAM.

Amazon: What’s going on? The TTD conversation evolved into a discussion of wanting to move away from Amazon TAM, as it’s been giving publishers headaches. This is happening while some publishers have been fighting to regain Amazon’s good graces since the summer. A new topic that popped up this week was about a data leakage: “What I understand is happening is that with Amazon TAM and as ad slots refresh, Amazon is leaking memory, which then causes the browser to use a massive amount of memory. The key to this happening is the long sessions (30+ minutes). We don’t see this on short sessions at all.”

In App discussions: Some debate as to whether it’s worth turning Google’s mediation waterfall back on now that most demand can flow through SDK bidding, with one person deeply skeptical after years of high-maintenance MoPub-style setups. The only upside mentioned is that it will unlock a few waterfall-only buyers (notably Meta and Pangle for full-screen interstitials), but even then, there’s doubt that it’s worth the complexity or that Google’s forecasts can be trusted.

One request from a publisher is whether others saw Android CPMs drop MOM across the board. They saw double-digit drops. 

Undocumented Google Publisher Console (googfc) update: Spotted in the wild in the Google Publisher Console is an undocumented configuration tab that displays additional information, such as Topics support and secure signal providers. 

New Year, New Bad Ads: “Seeing a ton of Norton AntiVirus redirects making the rounds over the last two weeks.” Confirmed that others are seeing it. From Jared Siegel at Aditude: “When CPMs tank at the start of the year, expect bad actors to sneak in if a publisher doesn’t have some ad fraud blocking.” Beeler.Take: Every publisher should have an ad fraud/security partner in place. 

A separate but related question came up about low-quality ads: “Do you all have any best practices for getting ahead of them outside the general blocking and tackling of block lists/brand safety guidelines, [a security partner], and dynamic flooring?”

DROP is live: Link. DROP is a California state government platform launched January 1, 2026, that lets California residents send a single deletion/opt-out request to hundreds of data brokers at once.

CMP Shakeup: Sourcepoint clients are reporting they’ve been informed they need to transition to Didomi over a set period (we’re not sure of the official timeframe). 

Carousel Ad Units: Continuing a conversation from before the holidays, in which people shared their take on carousel ad units, we received information from Opti Digital about the format and how it works. It’s an extensive reply available to publishers in the community. Alternatively, contact Opti Digital CRO Olly Aulakh olly@optidigital.com for details. 

Removing RESELLERS

A Beeler.Tech project to work with publishers to help create more transparency in the industry, with what we can control, and one area where they have control is who goes into their ads.txt files. We recommend that publishers work with as few RESELLER lines as possible and that demand partners defend and report on their RESELLER lines. 

“We’ve trimmed every partner down to 20 entries or fewer. So far, we have seen zero revenue drop-off. If performance remains stable, we are considering removing resellers entirely for most bidders. We’ll evaluate this on a case-by-case basis, as a few partners still drive significant spend via specific reseller lines.”

Evan Thor took to LinkedIn to ask for more transparency, and we’ve been encouraged by the responses. Mike O’Sullivan from The Trade Desk responded with this. 

The publisher community conversation took off as well and provided some interesting thoughts: “This is great, but TTD doesn’t buy through reseller lines.” Ah, but perhaps this is as much about observation as it is actual transactions. I expect this conversation will help us learn more about what DSPs actually see. 

Beeler.Tech asked publishers to reach out to their partners to get more visibility into RESELLER lines. Someone from a smaller European market has reached out and learned that Index Exchanged has stopped managing a larger number of reseller lines. OneTag provided all the requested details. “One strange thing, though, is that Amazon is asking me to mark the SSPs I use in TAM as “DIRECT” in the ads.txt files, even for sites I don’t own.” 

“Just recently started overhauling our ads.txt and wanted to issue a warning/reminder to double-check your IDs in the sellers.json files directly, especially if you have multiple domains. We discovered that more than half of our partners used either just one of our domains or a random domain for our account, so most of our bid requests were marked as unrepresented inventory.”

Developing Discussions

  • What experiences are people having setting per-bidder floors?
  • I am launching a new GAM instance next week and wonder if anyone has ever shared their full list of ‘bad domains’? I’m scared that I’m gonna get flooded with bad ads.
  • Do you guys know any publishers that partner with VideoAmp? A client (a broadcaster) is asking whether we work with them, as that’s how they track tune-ins, but I suspect this is more for TV networks than for digital pubs like us.