Above the Fold: January 19, 2026

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Above the Fold: January 19, 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

  • Opinions have been shared about the IAB and IAB ALM: LinkedIn Link
  • TD Foundation 20th Annual Holiday Cocktails Gala |Jan 22, 6:00 pm ET | New York Athletic Club Register now!
  • AI Publisher Response Live | January 23, 1:00 pm ET Virtual – Register here!

This past week Beeler.Tech hosted a publisher-only call focused on revenue models that think beyond the LLMs. If you are a publisher and your remit is to think about new revenue models, please contact us and join the growing community of AI strategists we are working with.

Top Topics Discussed This Week

New Microsoft Agreements: Apparently, not everyone has received the “Welcome onboarding to the Microsoft Advertising Platform” email (or it went to spam), and they’re not happy with support’s response to their questions as the deadline approaches. If this is an important partner, we recommend jumping on getting this processed before you get turned off – it might take longer than you expect. One note from a pub: “Keep an eye out for the vague ‘AI’ clause.”

New(ish) Term to know – “parallel bidding”: From the Beeler.Tech interview with Olli from Relevant Yield, which means running client-side and server-side at the same time.

Curation has gone quiet: Publishers haven’t been talking about curation for some time. “Had a great chat with someone this morning who described the cycle as the hype – the let down – the fizzle – the sizzle. I think we’re squarely sitting in the fizzle before the sizzle.”

Jan 13th AdX Incident: If you saw a significant drop in AdX spend this past week, you were not alone. Some saw drops of 70-80%. It was quite some time before Google acknowledged the issue and resolved it. However, some pubs’ updates after the 14th have some people still down by almost 50% since. 

What would make CTV better: The conversation dove into territorial rights and windowing (content only available on one service at a time). One call out was new creative formats to evolve as smaller advertisers do more on CTV.  A prediction was made: smaller brands that previously did not consider CTV are now entering the space and becoming a more immediate part of agency strategies. Lower production costs for video ads will make them more accessible to a wider range of advertisers. 

But will that lead to higher CTV CPMs? More advertisers should equal higher CPMs, but supply will outstrip demand. “Every time a service increases its subscription fee, more people agree to ads.”

Outstream Partners: A pub asked who others feel works best with them. Some partners mentioned:

  • Teads InRead (legacy outstream product (not Outbrain’s content rec))
  • JWX (fka Connatix): 
  • Ex.Co has an Outstream Player as well as their OVP solution.
  • AdPlayer.Pro (SaaS Product)
  • Assertive Yield has an Outstream player available in their hybrid wrapper (SaaS)

The Trade Desk’s ID Provenance Guidance Discussed: TTD outlined that they want to ensure the ID inserter and matcher are correctly identified, and that the match method correctly passes with each EID. We don’t have a link to the actual note to share. Pubs discussed, and one stated that most IDs are bridged, so perhaps not a big change – truly deterministic won’t scale. However, it was also mentioned that this is a positive initiative. Intermediaries have inserted their own user IDs, and perhaps, with this change, the publisher’s identifiers will be regarded as having greater value than others’. However, it could be argued that, in an attempt to get rid of bad players, it’ll just hurt publishers’ efforts to attach identifiers to inventory. 

Increase in Stringrippers reported: If you don’t know what that is, here is a description. 

Sourcepoint to Didomi fears lowered: Last week, there was a lot of concern about the transition and whether people needed to explore other CMPs. At least one pub, known for their acumen in the privacy compliance space, feels like the transition is on track.

US publishers trying to monetize in the EU: Too much to give the full context, but this advice seems to be solid: “Under GDPR, the vendors you enable in your CMP for consent must be only those with whom you actually have a signed DPA in place and an active business relationship. Bulk‑enabling the entire TCF vendor list is not really “legal”, also because you are required to explicitly disclose in the CMP which vendors may access personal data, and realistically, you cannot properly present every single vendor from the full TCF list. There are a lot of Publishers (big ones too) that have the global TCF enabled, but I really think it’s not the proper way to proceed. You also have to consider adding the “additional consent module” from Google: it helps with their partners that are not in the TCF.”

Weekly Amazon Mentions: Some questions about whether it makes sense to allow “AmazonAdBot” to have access. A pub that allows them mentioned a crawl delay may be useful to deploy, as Cloudflare was showing they were getting pounded by the bot. 

Separate conversation about APS Bid Adapter. Something is brewing. Expect an announcement soon. One discussion on this front focused on moving away from TAM and reducing the number of SSPs pulled through it to eliminate bid duplication. We’ll see how this develops. 

IAB Taxonomy Trouble: “While I find IAB’s audience taxonomy to be reasonably robust, the ad product one is decidedly not.” Someone argued that the audience is more robust than contextual but still not up to par. Someone chimed in that it really hasn’t been touched in over a decade. Apparently, that was because of a lack of adoption, but the feeling was that people wouldn’t implement a solution that didn’t work. Some recommendations for mapping: Amazon is best for product. Google Places is best for places. Adwords is best for in-market intent. NAICS is fine for industrial. It’s better than SIC. There are many open-source crosswalks that map overlaps or cross-identify categories. 

Mobile App Metrics

The discussion started by asking how other app companies align on monetization metrics. How do you calculate ARPDAU? How do you calculate ARPU? Which team uses which metrics? One point made worth sharing: sometimes these metrics and how they are calculated serve multiple purposes – shareholders vs day-to-day, and that itself could be an interesting conversation. Another great statement: “I’ll accept a lower CPM if it more than drives up fill to account for it. For this reason, I don’t typically let anyone outside of RevOps opine on fill or CPM. Our job is to maximize Ad Request CPM, and we track to that.”

Someone shared their strategy:

  • When I want to measure demand yield, I use Ad Request CPM, often called RPM: Ad Revenue / Ad Requests * 1000. It’s a fairly stable metric and provides a yield metric to optimize. However, changes to ad request logic can make YOY comparisons difficult. Monitored daily by the yield team.
  • ARPDAU – Today’s Ad Revenue/Today’s DAU. Best metric for revenue forecasting and understood across multiple departments. The challenge is that it discounts user behavior over time. Used with leadership for budget tracking, forecasting, and budgeting. Product uses it as a measure of product success. 
  • When I want to know a user’s true value, I use ARPU(x). Good for an ad product to track retention and related metrics. It is backward-facing, however, and needs to be contextualized. 
  • Lifetime value (LTV): Helps the growth team understand CAC calculations. 

Developing Discussions

For publishers that have received letters from law firms in CA alleging data privacy violations (usually based on CIPA), how have you handled them? I’m specifically referring to predatory claims, not situations where users’ rights were legitimately violated. 

If you work with LiveIntent for bid enrichment, have you noticed that your lift percentage has fallen off a cliff?

Vibe coding: publishers are starting to share how they are using it. We’ll pull more of this together in the future. Some cool stuff has been mentioned, including a PMP creation agent chatbot. 

Does anyone know what happens when Chrome blocks an ad because it uses too many resources? Would GAM count that as a served impression? Would the SSP count that ad as a served impression?

Would love to get feedback on Adblock Recovery tools – do you have a solution in place?

Anyone working with Consumable? 

Any publishers using WordPress VIP out there? Wondering what you are using as your display and native ad plugin? In-house built? existing plugin? hybrid?