Above the Fold

Did anyone else get obliterated by Google’s June algo update? Even worse, it seems to have spilled over to our performance on discover and news.

When Chrome’s Heavy Ad Intervention pulls an ad for consuming too many resources, the slot goes dark. A member now reports that Google is automatically refilling those slots by default, without anyone asking.

Six large publishers (Condé Nast, Time among them) told Digiday how they’re shifting from impression-based pitches to direct-sold custom content, products, and events as Google search referrals tank.

Does agentic buying count as self-serve? Rough consensus says yes, with caveats. Today’s self-serve partners likely aren’t tomorrow’s agentic players.

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.

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.

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.

Is having too many key-values in a bid request to GAM hurt response rates because GAM becomes slower or unable to handle the request?

How do you calculate ARPDAU? How do you calculate ARPU? Which team uses which metrics? One point made worth sharing: sometimes these metrics and how they are calculated serve multiple purposes – shareholders vs day-to-day, and that itself could be an interesting conversation.

There’s a Beeler.Tech project to work with publishers to help create more transparency in the industry, with what we can control, and one area where they have control is who goes into their ads.txt files.