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.
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.
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.
For years, publishers have been stuck with the same uncomfortable trade-off: grow ad revenue, or protect the reading experience. Adding placements has always felt like borrowing against the future, since more ads can mean a diluted property, distracted audiences and advertisers who quietly drift away.
For the last few years, digital publishers have been playing a defensive game. The foundation that powered publisher growth for more than a decade is rapidly changing. Search engines are moving toward AI-driven, answer-first experiences that increasingly satisfy user intent without requiring a click.
Agentic AI is one of the most talked-about topics in advertising right now, and one of the least understood. An LLM can happily draft an RFP response in seconds, but turning buyer demand into repeatable, revenue-generating campaign orders is a much bigger job. The gap between those two things is where most publishers currently sit.
