Originals

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?

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 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.

Publishers don’t have the luxury of waiting for a market rebound, a cleaner AI story, or a perfect internal roadmap. The theme of our recent Pub.Call was much more urgent than that.

Our conversation emphasized publishers moving beyond traditional metrics to focus on revenue per session and overcoming current market challenges like declining traffic and privacy regulations.

To explore how publishers can move from reactive chaos to proactive control, Rob sits down with Chris Quinn, Co-Founder, ProOps Consulting, a firm that has spent years embedded in both the sell-side and buy-side realities of ad ops.