Liz 
We’re in a world right now where the only constant is that everything and everyone wants our attention, and people only have so much attention to give. What the platforms have learned is pulling us back and forth with conflicting stories holds our attention better than anything else: it confirms my biases while simultaneously testing them.
We’re kicking off this month’s Camp.Fire with Evan Thor, who digs into a broken part of the mobile ecosystem: interstitial ad UX. We also recap, review, and analyze the critical conversations from Navigator NYC and AI Publisher Response.
A pub asked how critical it is to send schain in bid requests to the buy side, and whether demand partners are blocking publishers without it. Another publisher said flatly: Don’t send it if you’re a publisher.
Last week, someone on a panel described their AI workflow in a way I have not been able to shake. They set an agent in motion, then go work out. When they get back, they review what happened, kick off the next agent, and go take a shower.
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.