With open-market revenue under pressure, 2026 will reward publishers that focus on audience value, smarter selling, and operational discipline.
As we head toward 2026, there are more questions than answers in the future of publishing and monetization. When we face these unknowns, I’m reminded to double down on what makes publisher revenue operators successful, while also adapting to what we see coming around the corner.
Here are the biggest trends for the coming year:
- Open market CPMs and search traffic will continue to decline at an accelerated pace. Buyers want confidence in quality, targeting and outcomes, pushing more budget toward curated inventory and walled-garden platforms, particularly in CTV.
- Buy-side platforms will begin enforcing new ad quality/density standards to rebrand the open internet as a safe, efficient and effective platform. There will also be continued efforts to resolve identity to provide measurable outcomes for advertisers.
- Ad tech innovation won’t automatically translate to publisher revenue growth. Developments in protocols, AI agents and emerging platforms are designed to shift budgets and solve buyer problems, not necessarily to increase publisher monetization in the near term. A publisher’s most valuable asset isn’t the content or the platform; it’s the human connection with their audience.
Below are five strategies to consider in light of these trends.
1. Understand your users
Who are they, how do they discover your content and why do they engage with it? With these fundamentals, you can build meaningful relationships that drive monetization. Couple segmentation with ARPU (average revenue per user) and LTV (lifetime value) metrics, and you gain a framework for evaluating trade-offs. A lighter ad experience that reduces short-term revenue per session may increase total revenue by driving repeat visits, longer sessions and higher engagement over time. Optimize for user value, not just pageview yield.
Practical Tip: Prioritize user registration. Registered users enable segmentation by traffic source, content type and life cycle stage—the building blocks for differentiated monetization. Identify your highest-value content and gate it behind lightweight registration (email only, no password required).
2. Create value for advertisers
Protect your inventory by delivering outcomes, not just impressions. Programmatic advertising budgets will continue chasing efficiency and performance, which translates to downward pressure on open market CPMs. The only sustainable defense is creating differentiated value that commands premium pricing. Follow the money and understand what buyers optimize for, then engineer your inventory to deliver it.
Create new inventory formats that perform exceptionally well. Prioritize high-impact placements with strong CTR, viewability and attention metrics.
Practical Tip: Optimize inventory quality through strategic reduction. Implement request throttling when fill rates drop to improve scarcity and efficiency, deploy dynamic refresh based on performance data (i.e., CTR) rather than uniform rules, and replace multiple commodity placements with single high-impact formats that command premium CPMs through direct sales or specialized vendors.
3. Focus on selling
Learn to sell and build sales strategy into your planning. Just as viewability became table stakes for performance, pricing, packaging and go-to-market strategy are becoming requirements for growth. Money is shifting from open exchanges to curated deals, PMPs and programmatic guaranteed. Become an expert in these channels. Join sales calls. Build relationships with agencies and brands. Understand what quality and performance mean to them, then engineer your strategy around those outcomes.
Practical Tip: If you aren’t in a sales organization, your gateway to buyers is through SSP and their curation packages. Educate your partners on what makes your inventory special and make it easy for them to curate your inventory.
4. The opportunities are in the details
Programmatic advertising never stays static. Challenge yourself and your teams to dive deep into performance data daily. Look hard enough and you’ll find opportunities.
Practical Tip: Obsess over daily performance data and audit technical setup. Check user behavior trends and optimize viewport ad layouts for common screen dimensions to maximize inventory placement. Review block lists to ensure they balance brand safety with revenue opportunity. Analyze bid density by placement to identify where low competition signals set up issues or restrictive targeting that need adjustment.
5. Innovate by building monetization opportunities
Publishers have historically excelled at finding new partners and technologies that moved the needle programmatically. This worked well when the goal was 15%+ annual revenue growth. But we’re facing a different problem now: We need to find growth while defending against weaker traffic trends and budgets shifting away from the open market.
Ad tech will continue solving ad tech problems. Publishers need to figure out how to engage with users, build connections and create monetization opportunities.
Practical Tip: Separate ad tech innovation from publisher monetization innovation. Emerging technologies like agentic advertising and AI-driven creative generation will eventually impact the industry, but they’re two to three years from meaningful publisher revenue impact.
Instead, focus innovation energy on near-term opportunities: new editorial products that create premium sponsorship moments, first-party data strategies that enable better targeting or partnerships with complementary publishers for scaled curation deals.
A classic recipe
The publishers best positioned for 2026 are focusing on what makes them valuable: deep audience relationships that create differentiated monetization opportunities. They’re balancing optimization with sales capability. They’re building first-party data assets while maintaining operational excellence in the details.
The open market will remain an important revenue channel, but growth will increasingly come from the strategies above. These fundamentals have always been important differentiators for publishers. In 2026, they may become even more critical to sustainable success.