“Ain’t nothin’ gonna to break my stride/ Nobody’s gonna slow me down, oh-no/ I got to keep on movin’,” — Matthew Wilder, Break My Stride
At AdMonsters Sell-Side Summit Austin, Mediavine CRO Amanda Martin explored how AI-driven discovery and new rules for premium inventory are helping publishers remix control and stay profitable in the connected future.
We just wrapped AdMonsters Sell-Side Summit Austin, where I sat down with Amanda Martin, CRO at Mediavine, for our opening fireside chat. And one thing became clear: publishers stay strongest when they stop panicking and focus on what they can control.
Focusing on the Summit’s theme, The Connected Future: A Publisher’s Roadmap to Growth and Profitability, Martin mapped out a plan for how publishers can move forward in the zero-click era — with agency, accountability, and smarter alignment across the ecosystem.
I chose Martin to kick off the Summit because she’s bilingual, speaking fluently in the intricacies of both the buy side and sell side. Before Mediavine, she spent nearly a decade at Goodway Group and other agencies.
She had a front-row seat to how intermediaries — platforms, agencies, and ad tech providers — often complicated the relationship status between buyers and sellers with extra steps, hidden costs, and misaligned priorities,
Now, representing 17,000 independent publishers, she sees how easily control over data, revenue, and transparency can slip. And, how the sell side can start reclaiming it, piece by piece.
Here’s what stood out for me from our fireside chat…
The Disconnect Still Defines the Industry
“The middle has had incentives to keep us as far apart as possible — to ensure their existence remains.” — Amanda Martin, CRO, Mediavine
The buy side and sell side may be communicating more frequently nowadays, but they’re still not speaking the same language. And in the middle, all of the intermediaries taking their cut thrive on that disconnect.
It’s like two ships passing in the night — pubs optimizing for one thing, buyers another, and both convinced they understand one another’s intent when they don’t. Some standards and the sharing of first-party data have alleviated some of that tension, but the business model remains unchanged.
Publishers can control proximity and build more direct paths by understanding which partners actually add value. Supply Path Optimization (SPO) needs to be sell-side optimized, and not just another buy-side cost-saving measure.
It’s time to rebuild direct relationships with advertisers.
Premium Isn’t About Content
“Premium isn’t about your content. It’s about ad experience and performance.” — Amanda Martin, CRO, Mediavine
The industry’s been chasing premium content as the holy grail. Today’s benchmark focuses on how your ads load, their performance, and whether your audience is staying engaged.
At Mediavine, they found that fewer ads can perform just as well or even better than a page cluttered with ads. “We’ve proven we can have fewer ads on page and retain CPMs that allow us to have the same revenue thresholds,” she said.
Buyers are no longer chasing the most prominent names on the Comscore list. The new definition of premium will be measured in attention.
Transparency Without Accountability Isn’t Transparency
“The issue with transparency is that it’s not backed up by accountability. We’re in a prisoner’s dilemma on the sell side.” — Amanda Martin, CRO, Mediavine
We’ve been talking about transparency for years. Remember, ads.txt, sellers.json, and SPO, among various other processes and methods for increasing transparency? Or what about all of the auditing tools we’ve seen over the years?
The problem hasn’t been that these things can’t work. It’s that nothing is being enforced.
“If you could follow a protocol, and then the bad actors would get rooted out, you’d get rewarded for doing the thing you were asked to do,” she said. “But that’s not how it works.”
Bad actors keep playing in the open because there’s no consequence, and publishers doing things right often pay the price.
Publishers don’t need another protocol. They need follow-through — and the courage to call out what’s broken, even when it’s inconvenient.
AI Didn’t Break Discovery — People Did
“AI gets more blame for traffic loss than it deserves. Search just doesn’t have as much to give anymore.” — Amanda Martin, CRO, Mediavine
It’s easy to point fingers at SGE and overlays, but traffic loss is more of a human problem than a machine one. Audience behaviors have changed. People discover content in social environments and chat feeds and never click out.
“The adjustment of how people find you has never been static,” she said. “We just had a good long run with search.”
It’s time for publishers to stop waiting for Google to restore the old order. The sell side needs to package content for where discovery lives today. It’s contextual, conversational, and curated.
If you’re not developing communities, tagging your content correctly, personalizing it for your audience, or repurposing it for where your audience will find it, you’ll be left behind.
Choose Your AI Partners, Don’t Block Them All
“Publishers shouldn’t roll over, but we also can’t block everything. Cloudflare lets you pick who gets access — that’s control.” — Amanda Martin, CRO, Mediavine
When it comes to AI partners, Martin doesn’t believe publishers should fully open the gates or totally lock them down. She pointed to Cloudflare’s selective-access model as a way to regain control. Consider selecting AI agents that bring value, while blocking the rest.
As AI-driven buying tools evaluate pages on engagement and experience, that’s how AI-safe inventory will become more than a concept. It’s not about fighting AI — it’s about defining the terms of engagement.
When publishers control access to their data and define its value, they flip the script from being mined to being in demand. The new playbook is AI curation.
Squeezing the Middle
“If the buy side is squeezing the middle, the sell side needs to squeeze the middle too.” — Amanda Martin, CRO, Mediavine
AI and automation are catalysts for the sell side to do its own cleanup.
Traffic shaping and curated supply give publishers a clearer picture of who’s adding value and who’s just sitting in the chain collecting rent.
“The problem,” Martin said, “is that you shouldn’t be able to water down your supply chain and see economic benefit.”
It’s time to evaluate every partner touching your inventory. Redundant lines in an ads.txt file dilute value, while clarity raises yield.
Who Speaks for the Publisher?
“You can’t let your agents be the only ones speaking for you.” — Amanda Martin, CRO, Mediavine
There’s a real tension between the scale sales houses provide and the risk of them becoming another layer of distance between publishers and the control they have over how their inventory is valued.
As with any partner, publishers should have a direct voice in how deals are structured and how their data is used—they don’t need another proxy in the room.
Less Ads, More Value
“As someone who runs an ad monetization company, I’m saying I want fewer ads — because that’s what will keep us alive.” — Amanda Martin, CRO, Mediavine
Publishers have been through enough eras to know that hype doesn’t last. But adaptation does.
Martin sees a near future where ad density and experience will be measured, not assumed. The open web that survives won’t be the one with the most impressions. It will be the one audiences actually enjoy using.
It’s time to stop panicking and realize that AI is forcing a remix. The time is now for the open web to mature with fewer, better ads, backed by real data value and audience connection.