Cut the friction, keep the value: what publishers need to fix now

BY HAZEL BROADLEY, BEELER.TECH

The Pub Report is a brand new webinar co-hosted by Prebid.org and Beeler.Tech, built to answer practical publisher questions. In our first session, we heard from Andy Sharkey (Optable), Brian O’Kelley (Scope3), Dr Paul Farrow (Microsoft Ads), and Scott Siegler (Amazon Publisher Services).

Across the session, four priorities kept surfacing: reducing operational drag, packaging value in ways buyers actually understand, pricing content for an AI-driven market, and simplifying the ad tech setup publishers rely on today.

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Stop letting deal growth become ops drag

Andy Sharkey opened with a problem most publishers already feel. PMP and curated deal activity keeps growing, and by the end of 2026, eMarketer expects 85% of programmatic display ad dollars to carry a deal ID. That’s good news on paper, but the workflow around those deals still looks painfully manual, especially when first-party data is involved.

A typical campaign still moves through RFP, audience creation, proposal, negotiation, activation, and reporting – with too many handoffs at every stage. Buyers aren’t immune either. From their side, publisher data is valuable but often inconsistent, and every supplier packages it differently, with its own mix of signals and formats.

That’s why Andy’s pitch for sales agents sounded grounded rather than futuristic. He described a programmatic sales agent as doing three things well: helping publishers control inventory, data, and pricing; making those packages easier for buyers to discover; and connecting everything into the SSP layer where deals actually run. The upside is straightforward – shorter workflows, less friction, and more publisher control over what’s exposed and to whom.

Sell what marketers are actually trying to buy

Brian O’Kelley shifted the lens by asking publishers to look at the market from the buyer’s side. His point was that marketers are drifting toward channels that are easier to buy, easier to measure, and easier to operate with smaller teams. This helps explain why social platforms keep gaining share, while parts of the open web still feel harder to work with.

That leads to a bigger challenge than just format innovation. If more buying happens through APIs – and if closed platforms continue to streamline activation – publishers can’t assume the core product will always be a CPM-based impression. It might just as easily be a newsletter placement, podcast sponsorship, reserved takeover, or pricing model tied to clicks, views, completions, or even conversions.

This doesn’t mean publishers need to become performance shops overnight, or that programmatic somehow disappears. It does mean being clearer about what’s being sold when marketers ask for results. “Outcomes” only work if both sides define them the same way – and for many growth-focused buyers, that means actions, clicks, or sales signals, not just exposure.

Price content before someone else does

Dr. Paul Farrow then widened the discussion from ad products to the economics of content itself. He described the old model as relatively clean: users searched, search engines monetized the index, and publishers monetized the visit. AI assistants start to break that loop by delivering answers directly, without sending users to the source – weakening the value exchange that content relied on.

Licensing deals between major publishers and AI companies are still important because they prove willingness to pay. The problem is that they don’t scale well enough to support the wider market, which is why Paul argued for a more granular marketplace that could serve not only large news organizations, but also specialist publishers, research archives, books, trade publications, and other niche content creators.

That model depends on clearer distinctions than the industry has historically needed. Content used for training isn’t the same as content used for real-time grounding, and publishers may want to price those uses very differently. Demand also won’t be limited to the largest AI players. Agentic browsers, publisher-owned chat experiences, and other emerging interfaces will all need trusted and well-structured information. So, the question isn’t purely content volume, but how useful and reliable that content is when someone needs an answer.

Clean up the pipes before the market moves again

Scott Siegler brought the conversation back to the part publishers can act on right away. His update on Amazon Publisher Services’ Prebid adapter focused less on new features and more on removing friction from existing setups. He described a familiar mess of spaghetti code, conflicting timeouts, race conditions, and those hard-to-diagnose revenue dips where nothing is obviously broken – but performance drops anyway.

The adapter’s appeal is that it simplifies that setup while preserving choice.It creates a cleaner, more unified auction, improves bid density, and consolidates analytics – while allowing publishers to run demand through a single set of Prebid line items instead of parallel systems. That means publishers can apply custom logic in one place, reduce complexity inside the ad server, and still keep the APS tag in place during testing without duplicating bid requests.

Meanwhile, tools like Connections Marketplace, Amazon Publisher Cloud, Signal IQ, and demand path reporting add another layer by helping publishers understand the value of their signals. From there, they can compare supply paths and move closer to outcome-based measurement. Some early adopters are seeing a 40-60% revenue uplift, while others are benefiting more from lower operational costs and cleaner setups – both of which matter in a market that’s still shifting.

The session stayed close to the decisions publishers are actually grappling with, and the same themes kept surfacing: reduce friction wherever it shows up, explain value in terms buyers recognize, treat content as something that needs active pricing and protection, and simplify the systems holding it all together.

When the rules are still evolving, having a space like the Pub Report to compare notes and get specific about next steps is crucial. We hope you can join us for the next session – details coming soon, so stay tuned!

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