Liz 
Inspired by The Might Mighty Bosstones’ 1997 hit, this week’s subject line likely nods to the pop-up ad craze of that era. Yeah, I served some of those in my time. Wasn’t happy about it, but we needed the revenue. Seems things really haven’t changed.
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.
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.
The new world is about efficiency, and you need to be all over that. I just suggest that at least one of the humans you keep in the loop is a pain in the ass.
If information is becoming easier to summarize, synthesize, and reproduce, then publishers need to give people reasons to show up that go beyond simply reading an article.
For most of human history, if you wanted to tell someone something and they weren’t standing in front of you, you had two options: send a person or write it down. (Or, if you were living 4,000 years ago, you chiseled your grievances over a shady copper merchant onto a clay tablet.)
For most adops and revenue teams, ad security still sits in the “deal with it when it breaks” pile, treated as a hygiene issue rather than a structural feature of how programmatic now works. In this interview, Danielle Koffler, Staff Product Manager at Confiant, explains why that framing leaves publishers a step behind.
Start ’em, sit ’em is back, with Craig Leshen, President of adops.com, once again in the interview chair. It’s time to drill down into which aspects of adtech deserve real focus in H2 2026, and which ones should stay on the bench until the plan, or the market, is ready.
Content provenance is no longer a conversation we can “circle back to” later. If we’re not willing to make these decisions for ourselves now, we’re not going to like what everyone else decides on our behalf.
Programmatic still runs as a buyer’s market: buyers hold the classification power, buyers make the go or no-go call on your site, and often you’re being judged without knowing it’s happening.