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.
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.
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.
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.
Bots are hitting your site at meaningful scale, and most teams still don’t have a clear picture of which ones matter, which ones are useful, and which ones are just taking.
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.
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