Liz 
I’m tired. A lot of my friends in ad ops are tired. We keep being asked to absorb the same preventable problems on behalf of organizations that have decided learning isn’t worth the time it takes.
For the past two years, publishers have largely talked about AI in abstract terms: opportunities, risks, legal concerns, SEO disruption, licensing deals, existential dread. Yes, they are all important. But they’re increasingly disconnected from the practical question every operations, revenue, and editorial team now faces: what are we actually doing with this stuff?
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.
The future is ours to define. That’s my takeaway from last week’s Beeler.Tech events, Navigator NYC and AI Publisher Response. I don’t say that with a false sense of optimism. It’s all hard work from here on out. But it’s hard work that we’ll do together.
For years, publishers have been told to obsess over CPMs, viewability, and time-on-site. But according to Playwire’s new report, State of Publisher Ad Revenue 2026: Insights and Opportunities, many of the industry’s most commonly discussed metrics are not actually the strongest predictors of publisher revenue.
AI has made building and shipping software easier, which means the build itself is no longer the moat. Success now depends on whether the problem is painful enough, whether the product truly fits the market, and whether the company has access to data others cannot easily replicate.
Possible is like the Mos Eisley Cantina, perhaps with slightly less scum and villainy. There, people talk about AI differently than they do on my planet, Beeler Prime. Like the Force, marketing is a foregone conclusion: it is everywhere.
AI can be useful in surfacing patterns, ranking information, speeding up repetitive steps, and supporting decision-making. But the people building and using them still need to understand how the system works: where the data comes from, how it moves, what gets logged, where the risks are, and where human judgment belongs.
Publishers know what it feels like to lose revenue without a clean explanation. A buyer avoids your site. A domain gets flagged. A piece of inventory gets treated like a risk. Sometimes the reason is obvious. A lot of the time, it’s buried inside someone else’s methodology, vendor score, block list, or browser standard.
That combination of a curiosity about adtech and a genuine respect for the role publishers play is what pulled me across the fence. That shift gave me a rare vantage point: I know what advertisers are thinking when they open a media kit or decide which partners make the plan.