Trust issues

by

Trust issues (September 28, 2026)

BY ROB BEELER

My mind is spinning right now and it’s not because this week includes two webinars— first, Opti Digital, and then The Pub Report (for publishers only)—a dinner, and a presentation at Google. All of that leads right into the now-sold out Base.Camp La Jolla, quickly followed by a panel at Prebid, emceeing DanAds Summit before heading to Toronto for Digital Day Camp. 

No, that’s not what has me discombobulated. It’s trust issues.

This past week, I recorded an episode of our podcast (Beeler.Cast is coming back) with Kate Kaye. She has her own podcast: Trust Control, and we discussed measuring trust. Human connection and trust are the future of publishing, but as Kate dives deep into this, measuring trust isn’t so easy.

It makes me realize just how shaky the ground beneath our feet is as we all try to build a solid foundation for our businesses. When you build a house to withstand earthquakes, you don’t build it while you’re having an earthquake, yet the ground never settles.

So how do we move forward? I think the answer is to create the “Question Economy” as I’m calling it. We need to make people curious, then deliver and come with receipts. That means not taking shortcuts but instead showing your work when asked. I think more and more of this will come down to communicating that a person who cares was involved and owns it. I don’t know exactly what that looks like, but it’s what we should all be exploring. 

I know I’m supposed to be talking about ad tech and ops and instead, I’m delivering these philosophical questions. But here’s the thing: people know to only/sorta/kinda trust ads and that works for advertising. It’s a known transaction that people know they need to be careful with what an ad says. Can publishers afford to be put in that camp? If we are, how are we different from AI Slop?

Trust me – we aren’t done having this conversation. Let me know what you think.

Here’s what you need to know this week… 

  • ICYMI, Base.Camp La Jolla is officially sold out! For those of you attending, we can’t wait to see you on Sunday. If you can’t make it, don’t worry… we’ve got a lot of exciting announcements for 2027 coming soon!

  • This Thursday at 3 pm, join us for the next Camp.Fire: MDCalc Case Study in RFP Automation & Contracting. MDCalc supports a team of nine sales reps. RFP season is high-volume and high-stakes and they were able to complete all RFPs accurately and by deadline with two human resources using a Claude Skill. Lauren DiGirolamo, Executive Director, Commercial Operations at MDCalc will take us through the challenge they faced, their solution requirements, and what they built to solve the challenge.
  • This Thursday, September 24 at 3 pm ET, we’re hosting another Camp.Fire: What’s in your morning report, and who actually reads it? Every rev ops team has a morning reporting or dashboard ritual. Between automated BI alerts, GAM dashboards, and client-side telemetry, daily reports can get bloated, making them hard to read or taking too long, or worse yet ignored by the people receiving them. We’ll come together to compare notes and talk about translating technical telemetry for non-technical executives. This is a publisher- and In View-only event.

  • Save the date: The Prebid Summit is happening on October 13 in New York City! Prebid Summit brings together the programmatic advertising community for a full day of thought-provoking sessions, technical insights, and meaningful networking with the industry’s leading publishers, ad tech companies, agencies, and innovators. Learn more and register here.

  • And then, on October 14, the DanAds Summit is also coming to the Big Apple! It’s an exclusive one-day summit gathering 170+ industry leaders to tackle our fragmented ecosystem head-on. And it will be moderated by our very own Rob Beeler. Learn more and request your ticket here.

Want to get caught up on everything we’ve published? Start here.

Here’s the latest…  

  • Building a video strategy publishers can own, with Minute’s Kyle Orr
    AI overviews and zero-click search have, in many cases, pulled the floor out from under publisher referral traffic, and the display revenue tied to it. Video has sat on the priority list for years, but the economics and the execution have both gotten harder. Rob spoke to Kyle Orr, SVP of Business Development at Minute about where video economics break down, the categories opening up beyond sports, how publishers should split what they build from what they hand to a partner, which formats belong where, and where first-party data does the most for yield.

  • How The Trade Desk measures publishers: in discussion with Mike O’Sullivan (Camp.Fire replay)
    How does The Trade Desk actually measure your site once an ad is served? That question came out of a discussion in the Beeler.Tech publisher community, so for our latest Camp.Fire, Rob invited Mike O’Sullivan, co-founder of Sincera (now part of The Trade Desk), to explain. The session covered how Sincera’s synthetic user gathers data, what can get in the way of accurate measurement, which signals have the most impact on value, and why PubDesk access is rolling out in stages. This conversation is for our exclusive publisher-only community. Please ask in the community for the password to watch this video.

  • Winning the war on dark traffic with Ad-Shield (webinar replay)
    Our latest webinar, hosted by Rob Beeler, Ad-Shield’s Dustin Cha, and Yahoo’s Eric Espinoza, examined “dark traffic,” and how publishers can recover ad revenue from these missing visitors. Dark traffic describes visitors who consume content, but leave little usable data or revenue behind. Ad-Shield’s latest report estimates that they represent an average 18% of web traffic. What’s more, they found that 57% didn’t even choose to block ads, so remaining unseen isn’t necessarily a deliberate user choice. This conversation is for our exclusive publisher-only community. Please ask in the community for the password to watch this video.

  • 9 years of ads.txt and still no confidence it’s correct (Camp.Fire replay)
    When ads.txt arrived in 2017, publishers were handed a file format and told to get on with it. Sellers.json followed in 2019, SChain shortly after. Nine years on, very few publishers can say with any confidence that their setup is correct. James Strang of JS.Consulting opened our latest Camp.Fire by acknowledging this, and he has implemented sellers.json for five separate companies from day one. Part of the problem is that the same SSP will give you different answers about how its own lines should be handled, depending on who you happen to ask. This conversation is for our exclusive publisher-only community. Please ask in the community for the password to watch this video.

A full list of our 2026 events we’re involved in, all in one nice little package:

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