Above the Fold: May 18, 2026

by

Above the Fold: May 18, 2026

BY ROB BEELER

This information is confidential and 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 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 varies based on the conversations.

Community Feed and Events

Metrics publishers prioritize may not drive revenue (new report from Playwire) – I sat down with Scott Schroeder. Some things here that I think could spark debate. Scott feels pubs are too conservative on ad density and page depth, too aggressive on floors and viewability. Only comment if you’ve read the article.

From Playwire: AI Content Farms Are Growing Fast. Here’s What Publishers & Advertisers Risk. <- the new MFA

Burt’s April 2026 open auction benchmarks report is out! Both Display and Video CPMs increased MoM, while advertiser spending decreased YoY compared to March. One Display advertiser achieved a significant >200% increase in spending MoM, while a specific Video advertiser achieved a >400% increase. Discover these insights and more in the full report.

Conde Nast’s Roger Lynch this week: “Assume there’s no search. You have to have your businesses planned as if search is zero.” https://tipsheet.ai/news/conde-nast-search/

From Aditude – How Server-Side Auctions Work in Mobile Apps – If server-side in-app bidding performs better, the obvious question is why more publishers are not already running it. The answer comes down to what it actually takes to set it up and maintain.

Happy Friday! Weekly Wrap-up is here 🙂 What Happened in Ad Tech – Week 20 | Relevant Digital

From Teqblaze: “Hi everyone, we organize a session dedicated to performance optimization algorithms that really work. We will share why traffic shaping alone only explains part of the picture, and what actually affects predictability and auction behavior in practice. This could be useful for people looking for ideas on how to improve performance. P.S. We will show real numbers and practical use cases. Join us on June 10, 2 PM ET: Registration Link

Top Topics Discussed This Week

Index Managed Demand: Index’s Managed Demand program is being read as an extension of what Index has historically done: facilitate network-style or marketplace demand across its exchange. The difference is that this may look more like insourced curation at scale, potentially adding a fee layer without Index having to carry a large sales headcount. Some see upside if it helps publishers sell inventory and data more effectively, especially if it brings truly net-new demand. The concern is whether it becomes a new tax on demand already flowing through Index. Participants noted that adding fees to existing deals could create competitiveness and legal issues, but exchanges have room to hide margin shifts inside broad “exchange operations” costs. Compared with PubMatic’s platform fee, this feels more palatable to some, but the key questions remain: is it opt-in, is demand incremental, and will reporting clearly expose any change in take rate? Which led to a conversation about…

Deal Taxes and Incrementality: The broader concern is whether curation and managed-demand fees can ever be cleanly evaluated. Publishers with premium, known brands question whether opting out would truly exclude them from deals, since removing high-quality supply could weaken the exchange’s package. That makes the “pay to participate” framing hard to trust. Several participants argued skepticism is warranted: opt-outs might reduce priority, but it is unclear whether demand would disappear, move through other DSP or exchange paths, or still reach the publisher with fees hidden in existing exchange costs. One publisher cited IX transactional fees as high as 32%, raising concerns that additional finder’s fees could push total rake above reasonable levels. The discussion broadened into frustration with curation economics, data markups, and signal companies monetizing publisher-derived data without sharing value. The biggest unresolved issue is not just the fee, but whether the publisher can prove incrementality.

Movement for an Open Web: “Who here is aware and or looking to take part in the Movement for an Open Web Search Only Contract for Web? “ – The Movement for an Open Web is a coalition of businesses advocating for a competitive, accessible internet free from the control of a few dominant tech platforms. It argues that regulators, not trillion-dollar corporations, should shape web access rules to protect choice, competition, trust, and business freedom online.  The Contract Search asserts website owners’ rights over content access, crawling, indexing, and AI use. It permits limited search indexing under strict conditions, rejects Google’s 2023 AI-related terms, prohibits AI scraping/training without permission, and sets fees and enforcement mechanisms for unlicensed access.

White paper regarding AI and Journalism: I was super-excited this morning when I saw that Open Markets’ Center for Journalism and Liberty published an announcement about a new joint white paper, “AI and the Future of Independent Journalism: The Promise and Peril of Privately Controlled Data Markets for Media Content,” written by CJL Director Dr. Courtney Radsch. (Our keynote speaker @ the AI Publisher Response was Jodie Ginsberg at the CJL). I am going to read through this, but I skimmed it, and I’m realizing this is a Cloudflare ad: “Into this vacuum stepped Cloudflare—not with legal doctrine, but with code. The company didn’t need to wait for Congress to pass legislation, or for judges to rule on the legality of their permissionless scraping. It simply altered its bot-detection protocols, rewrote default settings for crawler access, and gave (some) publishers the option to monetize their content.77 It did in weeks what policymakers have been debating for years.” <- not untrue, but good lord. ” So anyway, I think this might be worth a read. I’m going to read it, but with a bit of caution as to the motivation. <pdf available upon request>

Ads delivered within the Ad Server UI: “Anyone else get targeted by Pubmatic ads ONLY when using the GAM creative preview tool? And looking at the creative, it’s not even targeted to me. It’s targeted to advertisers. Pubmatic is using my screenshots, which I will share with our sponsors, to advertise to them that Pubmatic can give them increased Advertiser ROI. Is this Inception Advertising?”

Adx Line Items: Most publishers in the thread seem to follow Google’s guidance: one AdX order, one line item, and one creative per inventory type, even across multiple sites. One example consolidated 10 site-specific AdX line items into a single shared line item and saw flat-to-slightly better performance. Others still have legacy setups by ad slot, device, or size for pricing/reporting flexibility. The main trade-off is between operational/reporting preferences and a simpler setup. Common split: format-level lines like display, interstitial, and video.

Non-standard ad size PMPs: Some publishers do accept non-standard PMP sizes, but typically only within a controlled rich media setup. One example supports 1800×1000 desktop skins, similar to 1920×1080, via Magnite or PubMatic, plus 320×480 on mobile web. The key requirement is certified rich media vendors, such as Recod3 or Adform, to ensure creative behavior does not break the page.

AdX and AdSense no longer together: Google’s support page says AdX and AdSense can no longer run together in GAM. Publishers using both will need to move to AdX only once onboarded, while GAM + AdSense remains possible without AdX. Some welcomed the change, but noted smaller publishers may lose revenue where AdSense previously outperformed AdX.

International Programmatic Fill: For international programmatic, especially India, one strategy is to segment users by value and swap lower-value traffic to AdSense once CPMs fall below a set threshold. This can reduce ad-serving costs and unfilled open-market requests. India demand varies by user quality, not just country. Suggested demand sources include Vidazoo, AdaptMX, TTD, and OpenX.

Opera DSP: A reported Opera DSP issue suggests some creatives may trigger false clicks during mobile scrolling because their JavaScript template uses custom touch-based detection rather than relying on the browser’s native click handling. The key clarification is that this is not limited to Opera’s SDK; the problematic logic appears to reside within the ad creative itself. That means any SDK or supply path sourcing Opera demand could potentially show the same behavior. The recommended framing for Opera is therefore not just “fix the SDK,” but to investigate and fix the creative templates that generate false mobile clicks.

Developing Discussions

  • Who has integrated Prebid Sales Agent directly into GAM at this point?
  • Anyone happy to share uplift in registrations/logins they saw after implementing FedCM?
  • Has anyone had an issue with Amazon ABS Standard Reports? I can’t get any results from last month or any previous months now.
  • Does anyone have any QA standards in place to monitor AI-generated programmatic ads?
  • Is anyone accepting non-standard ad sizes like 1920×1080 (Desktop) and 800×1200 (mobile) through PMPs?
  • Has anyone who has worked with Colossus SSP had any issues with them recently?
  • Anyone else having issues logging in to Conversant/Epsilon?
  • Not to trigger anyone’s post-MediaMath trauma, but is anyone seeing late payments from Wunderkind and becoming concerned? We’re bugging them about December late pays, and saw that they had layoffs in December as well. Wondering if they’re having issues keeping up with publisher payments more broadly?
  • Curious if anyone has experience working with adWMG?
  • For publishers selling CTV: are buyers actually pricing programmatic upfront commitments differently from PG, or is “programmatic upfront” still just guaranteed deals with PMP wrapping?