From AI-driven traffic shifts to ad stack independence and ops innovation, the most popular AdMonsters stories for 2025 reveal how publishers took control of revenue, performance and strategy in a year filled with existential threats.
2025 forced publishers and ad ops teams out of passivity and into strategic survival mode. With the way the industry is headed, they had no other choice.
Generative AI search and chatbots are diverting traffic from ad-supported sites, and some independent publishers report that as much as half of their ad revenue disappeared this year.
Meanwhile, there was more drama than usual in the programmatic ad tech world. The largest independent demand-side platform, The Trade Desk, reshaped supply-chain dynamics by labeling all SSPs—which publishers rely on to optimize their yield from ad auctions—as resellers that are best avoided by savvy advertisers.
On the ad ops side, small technical innovations produced outsized results. For example, Major League Fishing boosted ad viewability from 55% to 89% on its site by adding a 30-line JavaScript snippet to its code.
As the year unfolded, some major themes dominated our coverage at AdMonsters: AI disruption to revenue models, tech stack transparency, publisher control over programmatic ad revenue, ops-driven performance and ever-evolving privacy strategy. Our eight most popular articles of 2025 reflect how publishers navigated each challenge and where the industry might go next.
AI’s Real-World Disruption: Economics Over Hype
Publishers vs. AI: Dealmaking and Rulemaking—Generative AI hit publishers where it hurts in 2025, reducing their traffic, revenue and audience control.
Norine Rogers from Norine’s Nest shared how zero-click AI search is siphoning traffic from her site, leaving her scrambling for ad revenue. “We’re seeing our referral numbers drop fast, and it’s not hypothetical anymore,” she said.
As of August, the recipe site’s revenue had dropped 48% year over year, and Rogers blamed Big Tech companies’ AI-driven search products for such a steep downturn.
The wider digital publishing industry likewise began openly sharing just how badly AI was hurting their business, prompting some serious discussion on how to push back and protect the open web. The IAB Tech Lab launched its CoMP initiative to lay a foundation for publishers to insist on control, compensation and credit when large language models ingest their content.
Meanwhile, AI startups took some tentative steps toward revenue sharing with pubs. Perplexity’s AI-driven Comet Plus browser earmarked funds for creators whose content is scraped by Perplexity’s AI and featured in responses to user queries. But such arrangements force publishers to weigh short-term revenue against long-term control over their intellectual property.
Reclaiming and Reworking the Stack
If AI was an external disruptor for publishers, the ad tech stack became their internal battleground.
Publishers scrutinized the value that intermediaries like SSPs and ad networks bring to the table. Some pubs prioritized operational independence as competition between programmatic tech platforms grew more heated.
SSPs Push Back Against The Trade Desk Classifying SSPs As Resellers—The Trade Desk’s decision to treat all SSPs as “resellers” sparked much of this year’s debate over who really adds value to the programmatic supply chain.
The decision also has practical impacts: Because TTD’s new AI-driven Kokai buying interface prioritizes direct-to-publisher supply paths, it often funnels demand away from supply paths that include SSPs. Which is a boon for TTD’s own OpenPath connections to publishers, but it’s a bust for SSPs that have long worked with publishers on yield optimization.
SSPs warned that The Trade Desk’s shift in strategy could depress publisher CPMs and skew demand toward TTD’s proprietary channels.
However, SSPs never miss a chance to take a few shots at each other, too. One SSP exec who asked to remain anonymous told AdMonsters, “There are intermediaries in this space that are net takers rather than net gainers.” They added that the best SSPs bring real value beyond just taking inventory and adding margin.
Breaking Free From GAM—But when it comes to stories that had publishers reconsidering their ad tech stacks, there was none bigger than Judge Leonie Brinkema ruling that Google has a monopoly in the online display advertising and ad server markets.
As a result of this landmark ruling, some pubs weighed declaring independence from Google Ad Manager (GAM) to reclaim their data and pricing autonomy. With that in mind, Robert Janes, Head of Product at AdButler, highlighted the tangible business benefits of self‑managed stacks, including improved transparency and higher profitability.
Amazon Joins the Prebid Party With Its Own Adapter—One thing that got Google in trouble in its ad tech antitrust trial was its refusal to compete directly with other SSPs inside Prebid, the software that most pubs use to run programmatic ad auctions. The Trade Desk also butted heads with Prebid this year, launching its OpenAds auction wrapper that’s based on Prebid’s open-source code.
But one big ad tech player that’s playing nice with Prebid is Amazon. It joined the Prebid ecosystem earlier this year by launching its own adapter that integrated demand from Amazon DSP directly into Prebid auctions. The move was a victory for interoperability, with one of the Big Tech walled gardens embracing fair competition rather than preferencing itself over independent SSPs.
Confessions of a Former Curation Hater—Sell-side deal curation is another topic that’s sparked countless hot takes over who’s bringing value to publishers and who’s just protecting their margins. But some curation critics—who saw sell-side platforms and tech vendors curating cross-publisher deals as nothing more than the return of the ad network—rethought their earlier criticisms as the curation chatter evolved this year.
One former curation hater who reflected on his change of heart was Ryan Maynard, SVP of programmatic sales operations at Raptive. He told AdMonsters, “I used to see curation as just another layer of complexity, but now I view it as a tool to align inventory with buyer goals and measurable KPIs.”
Such an evolution in thinking is natural as pubs figure out exactly which tools and tactics work best for their revenue goals. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, so the right answer only comes with testing.
Ops as Innovation
Speaking of testing, publisher ad ops teams continued testing alternative strategies for improving their ad experience without threatening monetization. From privacy compliance to performance optimization, ad ops teams became the linchpin of sell-side resilience in a year defined by AI disruption, regulatory complexity and shifting buyer expectations.
What Ad Ops Teams Need to Know About Privacy Now—Privacy remained a top-of-mind publisher concern as the patchwork of privacy laws in the US and abroad grew even more complicated this year.
“Ad ops teams are now navigating not just technology, but regulatory obligations,” Jessica Lee, chief privacy and security partner at the law firm Loeb & Loeb LLP, said in an interview with AdMonsters. “They must ensure opt-outs are honored, partners comply, and consent processes are defensible.”
Lee offered some advice for how publishers’ operational efforts directly affect both their legal risk and revenue. It was advice ad ops teams kept coming back to as they balanced their revenue and audience engagement goals with compliance concerns.
How A 30-Line JavaScript Snippet Took Our Ad Viewability From 55% To 89%—Ops teams also delivered some tangible performance gains with minor tweaks to their on-site code.
Jared Collett, Head of Ad Ops at Major League Fishing, shared how his site boosted ad viewability from 55% to 89% after implementing a 30-line JavaScript snippet that refreshed ads only when they were visible. This increase in viewability directly increased revenue and improved advertiser confidence in Major League Fishing’s media quality, proving that engineering choices can be as impactful as executive decisions.
Into the Signal: Redefining Media Quality—Speaking of media quality, the growing buy-side push to avoid wasteful ad impressions means publishers have to get serious about delivering the ad experiences that appeal to buyers.
“Media quality isn’t just about viewability or ad placement—it’s about ensuring that inventory meets advertiser expectations consistently, across platforms and devices,” wrote Scott Messer, principal and founder of Messer Media, in his guide to how media quality best practices are evolving.
Messer highlighted that having high-quality ad inventory—rather than a profusion of ad placements on the page—more effectively protects revenue for the long term, strengthening advertiser relationships and positioning publishers to negotiate from a place of strength.
After a year in which publishers and their sell-side partners have lost bargaining power to AI startups and increasingly aggressive demand-side platforms, having a stronger hand to play in advertising negotiations would be a welcome change in 2026.