Adam Fawer

Why Publishers Are Struggling to Unlock Their True Revenue Potential Digital publishing has never been more complex. On paper, programmatic advertising should be the most efficient way for publishers to monetize their inventory. In reality, most are fighting an uphill battle against challenges that quietly erode performance and revenue. 🔎 The core problems publishers face today: Auction complexity: The wrapper runs hundreds of auctions per second, but small inefficiencies in how those auctions are managed can cost publishers thousands of dollars daily. Low-quality requests: When requests aren’t filtered before reaching exchanges, they waste resources and dilute auction value. Ineffective demand sources: Not all traffic or partners are equal. Unoptimized sources—like certain countries, ad sizes, or apps—can hurt fill rates and reduce overall yield. Invalid traffic (IVT): Beyond just lost revenue, IVT damages trust with advertisers and long-term partnerships. Broken supply chains & cookie syncs: Even minor technical misconfigurations can disrupt accurate tracking and bidding, leaving revenue on the table. Manual work overload: Publishers and their AdOps teams spend too much time firefighting technical issues instead of focusing on strategy and growth. The result? Publishers often end up with lower CPMs, higher fraud exposure, and inefficient monetization, even though they’re running the same auctions as their competitors. 🚀 The turning point What the industry needs is not just another optimization tweak, but a way to make the auction itself smarter, cleaner, and more efficient—while reducing the manual workload for publishers. That’s where AI-powered solutions like Bidlift come in: tools designed to sit inside the wrapper, repair inefficiencies automatically, filter out what’s hurting performance, and tailor auction execution for each publisher. By making the ad auction work for publishers rather than against them, these solutions are redefining what efficient monetization looks like.

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Hearst Television has found that about 30% of its digitized archive video can be monetized by licensing or used in creating new programming, according to Ernie Mourelo, who joined Fox Corporation's Ben Ramos, Sinclair Inc.'s Mike Palmer, Veritone's Paul Cramer and veteran technology writer Glen Dickson on last week's TVNewsCheck webinar, Mining the Archive for Content and Revenue. Great story, which links to the video of the event. https://lnkd.in/em_zteYb

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The tools already exist for agentic paywalls. We just need to make bizdev deals with the platforms. The future is two Zoom calls away.

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Every few years, the publishing industry finds a new bogeyman for its woes. This Digiday article is reflective of current state of affairs of the publishing industry. Everyone is looking for someone to blame for their changing fortunes instead of adapting with the times. This time the villain is "AI Content". My unpopular opinion: Some AI content is bad, and some is good—just like human content. The real judge should always be the audience, not some rating agency, government body, or industry group. If an AI-powered site attracts genuine visitors who engage and find value in its content, why should advertisers care how that content was produced? The answer: they shouldn’t. Engagement is engagement, no matter who - or what - wrote the words. I'd really hate to see publishing follow the same pattern of so many failed industries that tried to regulate their way out of changing dynamics. It didn't work for Taxis vs Uber or the music industry vs digital steaming and it won't work here. https://lnkd.in/ezgpZz-x

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