Step inside, if you dare. It’s Halloween, and publishers are coming face to face with their deepest fears, from AI apparitions to shadowy supply chains to invalid traffic lurking in plain sight.
This week, we invited a few brave souls from the publishing world to share what truly keeps them up at night and, more importantly, how they’re turning those nightmares into opportunities.
So grab your flashlight and follow us down the creaky corridors of ad tech’s haunted house. In each room, we’ll meet a new fear and learn how publishers are keeping the monsters at bay.
The Hall of AI Reflections
The first door opens to a corridor of mirrors. Each mirror shows a publisher’s content, headlines and words reflected, but not quite in the same way. These are the new faces of content discovery: AI-generated answer engines spitting out summaries that mimic publishers’ work while quietly stealing their audiences.
Meg Hong, Head of Programmatic Partnerships at The Arena Group, didn’t mince words about the specter of AI search.
“I would be remiss not to mention the alarming and growing impact of AI on publisher traffic,” said Hong. “As generative search and AI-driven discovery tools surface answers directly, fewer users click through to publishers and shrink the very funnel that sustains ad-supported media.”
Hong added that adjusting to AI search is more complicated than simply devising new SEO and GEO strategies. AI is structurally changing how audiences find and engage with content.
To confront this mirror monster, The Arena Group is diversifying where and how it monetizes. For example, it launched a deal-curation platform, Encore, that connects advertisers directly to in-demand, brand-safe inventory. According to Hong, Arena Group designed the product to reduce its reliance on third-party curation platforms. Which also cuts out the ad tech taxes those curation platforms collect.
In addition to the new threat of AI search, news publishers are dealing with another horror that never quite dies: brand safety.
“AI is stealing content from publishers and leading to decreased pageviews,” said Amanda Gomez, SVP of Revenue Operations at The New York Post. “And brand safety is always frightening for us. We need buyers to buy news.”
But what’s the counterspell for combatting buyers’ largely unfounded fears about advertising in news content? Diversification and education. The Post is pushing buyers and partners to move beyond keyword blocklists. Ironically, AI is playing a role in helping advertisers understand the sentiment behind news coverage and why audiences gravitate to it.
“We should be looking more at the sentiment of a page and not just the keywords,” Gomez said.
The Chamber of Secret Supply Chains
The deeper you delve into ad tech’s house of horrors, the more twisted and convoluted the hallways become and the harder it is to see who’s pulling which levers behind the scenes.
Amanda Martin, Chief Revenue Officer at Mediavine, sees the lack of supply chain transparency as a major source of programmatic paranoia.
“One of the most unsettling trends in ad tech is the growing opacity in the programmatic supply chain,” she said. “As complexity increases, publishers risk losing both control and visibility into how their inventory is valued and monetized.”
In other words, there are too many intermediaries between buyers and sellers and not enough transparency into how these relationships work.
Mediavine is tracing the outlines of the problem with its Optimized Ad Experience (OAE). The company is experimenting with how small shifts in viewability, signal strength, and reader engagement can help rebuild trust between buyers and publishers.
Independent analysis from Jounce Media found that OAE improved buyer performance by about 25%, suggesting that transparency and attention to user experience can translate into tangible value on both sides of the supply chain.
“It’s a win-win that shows transparency and quality don’t have to be frightening,” said Martin. “They’re the foundation for a healthier, more sustainable ad ecosystem.”
The Gallery of False Prophets
Shady intermediaries aren’t the only voices leading publishers down programmatic’s darkest paths. Digital advertising’s history has also been marked by voices crying “Publisher-First!” and “Empowering the Open Web!” while truly only looking out for their own interests.
Many of these thought leaders – these so-called publishers – are anything but. Behind their masks are tech companies, aggregators and sales houses, loudly positioning themselves as publisher-first while consolidating control over the open internet.
As one veteran publisher who spoke to us on background said, the scariest part of programmatic isn’t navigating complicated technology; it’s how the ad tech conversation has been taken over by self-interested stakeholders.
“Every time I log into LinkedIn, it feels like the conversation around publishing is being held hostage by companies that aren’t actually in the business of publishing media,” they said. “Their real agenda is expanding control over the open web through ad tech, not sustaining journalism.”
Real publishers, the ones running actual media businesses, rarely make it onto those event panels or the backrooms where standards are defined. Many don’t have the PR clearance to weigh in publicly, the publisher said, and, frankly, most don’t think it’s worth putting out a press release every time they launch a new ad slot or raise CPMs from $1.00 to $1.10.
Meanwhile, they added, the loudest voices are often powered by investor capital rather than newsroom budgets. These companies are the ones setting the narrative and scaring smaller publishers into adopting their “solutions” in order to survive.
The sales pitches, of course, never stop. “My inbox lights up every six months with the same offers,” the publisher said. “Our sales team is a small army, and your wrapper is not unique.”
Many of these sales houses bundle sites into broader Comscore profiles, thereby diluting the individual pubs’ brand identities, they said. They also clutter up the user experience on these sites with ads in the name of revenue optimization. But those short-term gains can lead to long-term media quality challenges.
Still, the publisher was quick to note that not every sell-side thought leader is a villain. Some tech-forward partners are contributing meaningfully to initiatives like Prebid and IAB working groups, offering a glimpse of what true collaboration could look like.
But as we close the door on this room, one question echoes through the hall: Do publishers really want ad tech companies to dominate the conversation on how to monetize the open web?