Publishers are under relentless revenue pressure, and most respond by squeezing more out of each channel. Direct, programmatic, commerce and subscriptions all have their own tools, reports and KPIs. Yet few publishers have the connected data and decision-making infrastructure to see how those channels affect one another, what’s likely to happen next and what to do about it.
Ahead of DanAds Summit 26 on October 14 in New York, Rob sat down with Johan Liljelund, CIO and Executive VP at DanAds, to explore how publishers should take the lead on agentic buying, the legacy processes frustrating buyers, and how to automate without losing the human touch.
In its latest webinar, Opti Digital brought together Olly Aulakh, Chief Revenue Officer at Opti Digital, and Rob Beeler, Founder & CEO of Beeler.Tech, to explore how publishers can move from seeing a change in revenue to understanding what is actually driving it, and deciding what action is worth taking.
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.
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.
In an industry still heavily dependent on pageviews and programmatic CPMs, that churn is baked into the model. Publishers chase the spike, monetize the impression, and start again. But as third-party cookies continue their long goodbye and advertisers push harder for addressable, consent-based audiences, that cycle is becoming harder to justify.
The 2026 World Cup is a useful pressure point because the spike in audience, spend, and operational risk arrives at once – and publishers that prepare early can turn demand into revenue, rather than watch value leak through a stack built for quieter days. We’re right in the thick of it now. How can publishers make the most of this moment?
As AI reshapes traffic patterns, privacy continues to evolve, and monetization grows more complex, the competitive advantage for publishers isn’t collecting another data point. It’s connecting the ones you already have quickly enough to make better decisions.
The session moved across identity, provenance, Prebid Server, and Prebid Cache. However, the common theme was that the next set of adtech defaults are being shaped now. So publishers, you need to get involved.
In this exclusive conversation, Eilon Goldstein gets into what GPID was meant to solve, where implementations tend to go sideways, and what publishers should look at first if they want to know whether their setup is helping or hurting them.