Tags containing: "digital advertising"

-coach drawing a play to show the new sports advertising playbook-

Advertising | Revenue | Supporter Spotlight

A new sports playbook can help media companies win ad dollars

November 11, 2026 Karisa Schroeder, Director of Product Marketing – MediaRadar

Sports used to be one of the simplest buys in media. The playbook was easy: find the game, buy the break. That playbook no longer holds. Games are now spread across broadcast, exclusive streaming, league-owned platforms, and team-controlled channels, and brands are showing up in more places around each event than a traditional media plan can track.

The commercial break is now only one part of how brands invest around a game. For media companies, that changes what’s worth packaging and how it gets sold.

More screens, more places to sell

As recently as 2022, sports distribution still mostly meant broadcast and regional sports networks. Today, a fan following one team through a season might watch on a national broadcast, an exclusive streamer, a league-owned service and a team-controlled channel. The traditional RSN model is fading, and streaming deals are filling in behind it.

Advertisers are following the audience. In a recent survey of 302 U.S. agencies and marketers, commissioned by Premion and conducted by Advertiser Perceptions, 73% said they plan to put budget toward live sports streaming and CTV over the next 6 to 12 months. Four in 10 said they’re doing it to extend the reach of their linear TV campaigns. The same survey shows what’s holding investment back: about one in three advertisers name platform and publisher fragmentation as a top hurdle.

That hurdle is an opening. Media companies that make cross-platform sports buys easier to plan and measure are solving a problem advertisers have already named.

The break is only part of the buy

MediaRadar’s 2026 World Cup data shows how much money moves outside the commercial break. From the opening match on June 11 through the Final on July 19, 6,737 brands invested around the tournament. Sponsorship value reached $1.88 billion, ahead of $1.42 billion in advertising spend.

A single match makes the split even clearer. In Argentina vs. England on FOX, commercial breaks accounted for $16.8 million across 30 brands. Program segments, including pre-game, halftime, post-game and in-game placements, accounted for $54.7 million across 73 brands and 15 asset types. That’s more than three times the value of the breaks.

Around one tournament, brands bought broadcast sponsorships, signage and equipment, linear spots, streaming and CTV ads, virtual overlays, and multilingual creative. Some showed up through ambush marketing with no official deal at all. For publishers and rights holders, the event itself is the product. Selling it spot by spot leaves value on the table that brands are already paying for somewhere else.

Creative is the context behind the spend

Spend shows where brands showed up. Creative shows why it worked. In our recent webinar, State of the Industry: The Convergence of Sports, Culture, and Creative, we noted that Pharma has become one of the clearest examples in sports. From August 1 to October 15, 2026, Eli Lilly invested $35.3 million in sports advertising, according to MediaRadar, with 67% of it in the NFL. The rest spread across college football, MLB, the WNBA and other leagues, with athlete talent like Shaquille O’Neal fronting Zepbound.

Novartis went narrower. Of its $20.1 million in sports spend over the same period, 97.6% went to the NFL, behind a campaign featuring former tight ends like Rob Gronkowski and Tony Gonzalez that pushes men toward a prostate cancer blood test. The creative works because it speaks the audience’s language.

The Farmer’s Dog shows what happens when a brand finds that fit and keeps building on it. The company went from a New York City kitchen in 2015, to its 2023 Super Bowl spot “Forever” winning USA Today’s Ad Meter, to $1.2 billion in revenue in 2024 and a 2026 deal as the NFL’s official pet food.

For media companies, creative intelligence is a sales tool. Knowing which campaigns are running, what they’re saying, and who they’re built for makes it easier to bring advertisers placements that fit the story they’re already telling.

Build for the next fan

Sports audiences are changing faster than most media plans. Formula 1 reports more than 830 million global fans, with 43% under age 35 and 42% female, up from 37% in 2018. U.S. fans alone number 52 million.

Leagues are building for that next audience directly. MLB Clubhouse is aimed at the future fan, and the NBA’s multiyear partnership with Nestlé spans 21 markets with a focus on youth basketball participation.

The new playbook for media companies

Brands aren’t only buying attention around sports anymore. They’re trying to become part of the culture around it. That calls for a new playbook:

Package the whole event. Pre-game, in-game, post-game, sponsorship and digital extensions sold as one opportunity, not a list of spots.
Make fragmentation easier to buy. Cross-platform planning and measurement removes a hurdle advertisers have already named.
Bring creative insight to the pitch. Placements that fit the stories brands are already telling are easier to sell.
Build for the next fan. Creator partnerships, original IP and year-round programming keep audiences engaged between games.

The game is bigger than the game. The media companies that sell it that way will be the ones capturing where sports dollars go next.

About the author

As Director of Product Marketing at MediaRadar, Karisa leads go-to-market strategies to launch and scale new innovations, bringing expertise in marketing intelligence, creative strategy, sports, and AI-enabled data and insights.

-advertising buyer using Agentic AI for programmatic ad buy-

Advertising | AI | Supporter Spotlight

Agentic buying shouldn’t repeat the Ad Tech Tax

November 2, 2026 Andy Sharkey, VP of Product – Optable

In 2020, DCN reported on a study that put a number on what many publishers had long suspected. ISBA and PwC traced programmatic spend from advertiser to publisher and found that publishers received just 51% of it. Despite a push for transparency from both sides, the structure hasn’t improved much over time. An open-market buy still passes from agency to DSP to exchange to SSP, with data, identity, and verification vendors along the way. Every hop is an additional cost, taken from the publisher’s share.

Now, the industry is building its first new way to transact since programmatic. Agent-to-agent buying could shorten the distance between buyer and publisher, or it could add a new toll at every step. Which one we get depends on the terms being set right now, while the market is still small enough to shape.

In agentic advertising, we can return to a simpler standard: a seller, a buyer, and a direct connection between them.

How we got here

Programmatic solved many problems in media buying. SSPs let publishers sell supply at scale, and DSPs gave buyers one place to manage spend. Every layer that followed, for data, identity, verification, and measurement, fixed something else.

Individually, these solutions added value. Stacked together, those solutions became a toll road, with every vendor between buyer and seller taking its share.

Direct deals at programmatic speed

Direct deals have always depended on conversations: buyers explaining what their campaign needs, and publishers explaining what their audience and content can deliver. This approach leads to strong campaigns, but it’s also why direct deals take so long to finalize.

For most campaigns, a week or more of emails, RFP responses, and manual planning isn’t worth the effort, so the budget goes to the open exchange instead.

Agentic buying cuts the back-and-forth down to minutes while keeping the buyer and seller in direct contact. Here’s how an agentic direct deal works:

Share the brief. The buyer’s agent sends a campaign brief to a publisher’s seller agent, outlining the buyer’s objectives and requirements.
Discover relevant ad products. The seller agent matches the brief to the publisher’s ad products—combining inventory, data, and pricing—and returns one or more options for purchase.
Select the buy. The buyer chooses which ad products to purchase (a human-in-the-loop activity today), and the buyer’s agent communicates that selection to the seller agent.
Review and approve. The proposed order goes to the publisher’s team for human review. The team evaluates the terms and approves the buy if they are acceptable.
Book the order. Once approved, the seller agent books the order into the publisher’s own ad server.

What comes out is a direct IO that moves at programmatic speed, with fewer intermediaries.

Or the same tolls at machine speed

None of that is guaranteed. Nearly every intermediary in the programmatic chain is building an agent of its own. If each one sits between buyer and seller, the deal picks up more fees, collected even faster than before.

The new tolls just look a little different:

A take rate on what the publisher is paid
A charge for every brief answered or task completed
Activation fees to put audiences or inventory in front of buyer agents
Clearing fees deducted from the publisher’s payout

Together, they rebuild the same stack of fees inside a new interface.

The first platforms to scale will set the defaults for how agentic deals are executed and priced. Publishers have seen this before: programmatic’s fee structure was standard long before they had the leverage to question it.

What fair agentic economics should look like

Standards bodies like AgenticAdvertising.org and IAB Tech Lab are working out how agents should talk to each other. How the money moves is up to the market. Publishers can help set those terms by holding platforms to principles such as:

The deal stays direct. Any platform that places itself between them should be able to say exactly what it adds to the equation and justify what it charges.

Platforms charge for software, not a share of the deal. A marketplace that takes a percentage of every transaction earns more as deals get bigger, whether or not it does more work. Pricing the platform as a service keeps the deal value with the people who create it.

The agent answers to the publisher. An agent paid on spend or take rate works for its operator. A publisher’s agent should carry the publisher’s prices and rules, and nothing should go live until a person approves it. When we surveyed 105 attendees at Optable Connect, two-thirds said they want agents to negotiate and prepare orders, with people approving the final buy.

The buy-side won’t wait

Publishers aren’t the only ones who want better, more direct deals. Independent agencies like Goodway Group are prioritizing direct publisher connections and trimming SSPs as part of supply-path optimization. Some buyers are already deploying buyer agents to transact on their behalf.

What that means is that buyers aren’t waiting for publishers to see the money first. Publishers who build now will help shape how agentic deals get done.

A direct model protects what this business has always run on: relationships. When buyer agents and seller agents talk, buyers and sellers are talking, too.

The next era of advertising

The value of agentic advertising comes from removing the distance between buyer and publisher. That’s why we launched the Optable Agentic Marketplace in October, with a 0% take on direct deals between buyers and Optable seller customers, that provides buyers a single connection point to connect to multiple seller agents.

For publishers, the first step is small. Pick one high-value package, price it, and put it in front of a buyer agent. Then look closely at how much of the buyer’s spend reaches your ad server compared to an equivalent buy through another channel.

The new standard should be the one the industry started with: direct connections between buyers and sellers, now possible at scale through their agents, with fewer intermediaries and better data between them.

About the Author

Andy Sharkey is VP of Product at Optable, the agentic advertising platform that helps publishers, platforms, and advertisers build, manage, and activate audiences, and transact directly through buyer and seller agents. He has spent his career building products for the sell side, with previous product roles at Permutive, CafeMedia (now Raptive), PubMatic, and FreeWheel.

-Illustration of the Google Ad Tech Monopoly Board-

Advertising | Featured Post | Policy

The Google ad tech remedies show why Congress must act

September 24, 2026 Chris Pedigo, SVP Government Affairs – DCN

For more than a decade, publishers have been telling policymakers that something is fundamentally wrong with the digital advertising marketplace. Now, after years of antitrust litigation against Google, a federal court has imposed remedies that point toward a remarkably straightforward principle: companies that act as intermediaries in the advertising market should not be able to use market power to secretly put their own interests ahead of the customers they serve.

The problem is complicated in its details but remarkably simple at its core. Google built an advertising business in which it could represent publishers selling advertising, represent advertisers buying advertising, and operate the exchange where those transactions occurred. Then it could write the rules governing how all of those products interacted.

Think about how differently we treat another marketplace where brokers execute transactions on behalf of their clients. When you hire a stockbroker to buy or sell securities for you, we don’t simply trust the broker to manage conflicts of interest however it sees fit. Federal securities laws and regulations establish obligations governing that relationship. Under the SEC’s Regulation Best Interest, for example, a broker-dealer making a recommendation to a retail customer cannot put its own financial interests ahead of the customer’s interests.

There is a good reason for that. A broker occupies a position of trust. The client depends on the broker to navigate a complicated, real-time marketplace and execute high-speed transactions on the client’s behalf. If the broker can quietly use information asymmetries to steer those transactions toward whatever produces the most money for the broker, rather than the best outcome for the client, the market doesn’t work the way it should.

The same common-sense principle should apply to digital advertising.

Judge Leonie Brinkema previously found that Google unlawfully acquired and maintained monopoly power in the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets and unlawfully tied those products together allowing it to take a supra-competitive portion of the transactions but maybe more importantly to steer the pricing, winners and losers of the auctions. The remedies she issued this month impose significant restrictions on how Google can use its position across the ad tech ecosystem.

Google must integrate its products to interoperate equally with competing technologies, including Prebid. Publishers must be able to access and export their own data. And importantly, Google’s AdWords cannot preferentially bid into Google’s own ad exchange, or another Google ad tech service simply because Google owns it. The court also established a monitor and technical committee to oversee Google’s compliance.

A significant loophole

But the order also contains a significant loophole. The prohibition against discriminatory bidding includes what the court calls a “narrow exception for advertiser values,” recognizing that the central purpose of a buy-side tool such as Google Ads is to deliver return on investment for advertisers. That may sound reasonable, but “return on investment” can become a remarkably elastic justification when the company calculating it also controls the bidding system, the underlying data, and significant advertising inventory of its own.

This could still leave Google room to steer advertising spending toward its own products and properties, including YouTube, if its opaque systems can spin outcomes as delivering better ROI for advertisers. For now, the principal assurance against that possibility is testimony from Google executives that its buying tools do not favor the ad tech systems Google owns.

And there is reason to treat that assurance cautiously. In arguing against breakup, Google warned the court that separating its ad exchange or publisher ad server would force it to direct more of its demand, what Judge Brinkema called “the golden goose,” toward its owned-and-operated properties, particularly YouTube. In other words, Google itself has already told the court that its incentives could lead it to steer spending toward its own inventory. That makes rigorous monitoring of the ROI exception essential. It also underscores the danger of relying on Google’s own AI-masked algorithms to distinguish legitimate advertiser optimization from self-preferencing.

Despite that vulnerability, there is an important principle running through these remedies: Google should not be able to use its position as an intermediary to benefit itself at the expense of the customers it is supposed to serve. The challenge is ensuring that the principle is not swallowed by an exception that Google itself gets to interpret. This is where legislation can help.

From antitrust remedy to market rule

Congress has already written legislation largely based on the same common-sense principle.

The AMERICA Act, introduced by Senators Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) along with a bipartisan group of senators, addresses conflicts of interest in digital advertising. For the largest companies, it would require divestitures that prevent one company from simultaneously having extraordinary market power on multiple sides of the market. For other large ad tech intermediaries, it establishes a series of obligations designed to protect their customers.

The best-interest obligation is particularly important as Google would have a statutory obligation not to put its own interests ahead of the advertiser’s. The legislation would require covered digital advertising brokers to act in the best interests of their customers, including by obtaining the best execution for their transactions. It pairs that obligation with requirements involving transparency, fair access and protections against conflicts of interest.

Again, we already recognize the logic of these protections in financial markets. We don’t tell investors that they simply have to cross their fingers and hope their broker isn’t putting its own financial interests first. We have established rules governing brokers’ conduct. The AMERICA Act applies that same basic principle to another enormously valuable marketplace dominated by intermediaries executing transactions on behalf of customers.

Publishers entrust ad tech companies with the sale of valuable advertising inventory. Advertisers entrust those same intermediaries with billions of dollars in advertising spending. When an intermediary executes those transactions, its first obligation should be to the customer whose interests it has agreed to represent—not to another part of its own vertically integrated business.

The Google case demonstrates what can happen when that principle is absent. The Justice Department documented multiple ways in which Google designed its products to benefit its own ad tech businesses, and Judge Brinkema ultimately found that Google had unlawfully abused its monopoly position in critical markets to squelch competitors and further enrich its bottom line. The court is now requiring nondiscrimination, interoperability, and data access in an effort to restore competition.

In other words, after years of litigation, we have arrived at something remarkably close to the basic proposition underlying the AMERICA Act: Powerful intermediaries shouldn’t be permitted to put themselves ahead of their customers.

We need a law, not a six-year fix

But there is a major difference, and it’s one that should cause concern. Judge Brinkema’s remedies apply only to Google and only for six years. The AMERICA Act would establish basic common-sense rules so that the entire marketplace is on a level-playing field.

Congress should not assume that six years of court supervision will permanently fix a market whose problems developed over decades. Nor should publishers, advertisers and consumers have to depend on the Justice Department bringing another massive antitrust case if similar conflicts emerge in the future.

The AMERICA Act would establish durable rules of the road regardless of which company dominates digital advertising five, ten or twenty years from now. And its best-interest obligation would establish an extraordinarily reasonable expectation: if you are being paid to act on behalf of a customer, you should act in that customer’s best interest.

The Justice Department’s case was enormously important. Judge Brinkema’s liability findings put a spotlight on Google by documenting the violations of the law and the subsequent harms to publishers. And her remedies are an important step toward restoring competition. But antitrust enforcement and legislation serve different purposes. Courts remedy violations of existing law. Congress can establish rules that prevent the same problems from happening again.

After years of litigation, we now have a real-world demonstration of why these protections are necessary. Congress should make them permanent by passing the AMERICA Act.

-marketing executive standing in front of a seemingly infinite number of video screens holding a laptop to show video ad choices-

Advertising | Industry-Research | Research | Video

Advertising’s year of the better bet

August 10, 2026 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

The biggest move in the market this past year wasn’t a bigger budget, it was a better bet. And for the platforms and publishers competing for that budget, understanding where the bet landed matters as much as the number itself.

Total U.S. media investment came in around $281 billion in 2025, according to MediaRadar’s Annual Investment Blueprint, up just 0.3% against 2024. That’s not really the headline however.

The headline is what happened underneath it: your clients moved real money, tens of billions of dollars, into the channels that were actually working for them, and pulled it out of the ones that weren’t. That’s the reallocation digital media leaders need to be tracking, since it’s a direct read on where advertiser demand, and the dollars behind it, are heading next. Digital alone accounted for 65% of the $281 billion, or $182 billion, and even that share hides a lot of movement. As the report frames it, this was the year of moving from scale to precision, an outcome-led mix rather than a broad one.

The clearest example of a bet paying off: social hit $65.5 billion in 2025, up 9.9% year over year. It now sits at about 36% of all digital spend, and has officially passed search for the first time. And it was no small leap, either. Social was trailing search by $3.7 billion the year before. Now it leads by $4.1 billion.

That money had to come from somewhere, and a lot of it came out of search (down 3%) and display (down roughly 3.5%), two channels advertisers used to default to without a second thought. For platforms and publishers holding search or display inventory, that’s worth sitting with: it’s demand your clients aren’t bringing back on its own, and it points to where they’re expecting to find performance instead.

Video keeps compounding, and it’s where advertiser attention is consolidating.

Video was the other bet that paid off, spreading across formats rather than consolidating into one. Online video grew 6.7%. Mobile web video grew 5.5%. AVOD, streaming’s ad-supported side, grew 13% and now sits at $19.2 billion.

And as live games keep moving off linear and onto streaming, the role sports has to play in this shift can’t go unnoted: AVOD picks up the audience and the ad dollars that follow. It’s a trend worth watching closely: see how sports is reshaping the investment picture. Linear TV fell 7%, with cable, network, and local all down, and print dropped 22%. As the report puts it, your clients’ next dollar isn’t chasing reach anymore. It’s chasing attention, and that’s a design constraint worth building around.

What this means for digital media leaders going into the rest of the year.

MediaRadar’s analysis points to five signals worth planning around:

Allocation is the real lever now on the buy side, so track where your clients’ spend is actually gaining share and build your platform or inventory strategy toward it.
Social has passed search, meaning it’s now the benchmark advertisers are measuring every other platform and content environment against.
Video is compounding across formats while static display slides, worth factoring into how you prioritize inventory and ad products.
Search and display still hold value for advertisers seeking reach, but the growth budgets are moving to video: worth watching closely if that’s not where your inventory sits.
The TV economy is moving to streaming, AVOD included, a structural shift in where your clients’ demand lives, not a temporary blip to wait out.

None of this means search or television are going away. Both are still enormous, still foundational, still where a lot of reach lives for your clients. But in this kind of market, every platform has to justify its role to the advertisers buying into it. The properties that keep growing will be the ones whose numbers give clients a reason to stay, not the ones coasting on what’s worked before.

The report’s own conclusion says it best: optimize, don’t expand. 2025 wasn’t the year advertisers spent more. It was the year the best bets got rewarded, on both sides of the transaction. Those platforms that understood where their clients’ attention was heading got ahead of it, while others raced to catch up or were left holding a positioning that no longer matched where the money actually went.

The signals are clear, the data’s available, and the digital media leaders who move now still have time to position ahead of where their clients’ spend is headed next. After all, placing better bets starts with better intelligence.

Full channel-by-channel breakdown, monthly trajectory data, and methodology available in MediaRadar's Annual Investment Blueprint: From Signal to Strategy.

About the author

Kelly Killips is the SVP of Marketing at MediaRadar, where she leads marketing strategy to drive brand growth. With 15+ years in creative direction and a decade of team leadership, she brings a data-driven approach honed across AdTech, B2B, and B2C campaigns—building collaborative teams and scalable creative that turns marketing intelligence into measurable impact.

Audiences | Featured Post | Revenue

How one publisher turned newsletters into a digital growth engine

July 30, 2026 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

For Rough Draft Atlanta, newsletters aren’t just a distribution channel. They’re the engine powering its digital reinvention.

Recognizing their value, publisher Keith Pepper rebuilt editorial workflows, audience development and advertising around a newsletter-first model. The result is a digital business that has grown from 2% to 28% of company revenue while maintaining a profitable print operation.

As publishers search for durable sources of digital growth, Pepper’s approach illustrates how treating newsletters as a core business strategy transforms them into a platform for audience growth, premium advertising and digital revenue—offering practical ideas for publishers looking to strengthen their digital business.

A focus on digital opportunities

Pepper acquired Springs Publishing in 2020 when the previous owner was looking to retire. “I saw an opportunity,” he shared, outlining that the otherwise profitable company had virtually no digital income. Shortly after, the publisher’s first daily newsletter, Rough Draft Atlanta launched. It has since become not just the flagship newsletter, but the primary way news is produced and consumed for the publication.

Pepper explained that the idea for a daily local newsletter came about partly because of his own desire to have a product which served him as a local. “I wanted to read a [local newsletter] every day. And we also needed a way to engage with advertisers and readers in between those print dates,” he outlined.

There was also very limited competition back in 2020, just before Axios Local formed. “There were a handful of local media companies that had an RSS feed newsletter, but there was no personality-driven newsletter like a Morning Brew or the Daily Skimm here in Atlanta.,” Pepper pointed out.

Pepper’s instincts are increasingly being echoed across the industry. The New York Times recently announced The Local, a new newsletter initiative in the Twin Cities designed to deepen reader relationships through locally focused journalism and serve as a model for future markets. While the Times’ goals differ from those of an independent local publisher, both strategies reflect growing recognition that newsletters can become a primary product for building audience habits and direct relationships, not just a way to distribute stories.

Print is still vital to Rough Draft Atlanta’s business, and Pepper credits the revenue as giving them breathing room to experiment with what worked in digital. “Even today, our revenue is 70% print,” he shared. “Being a digital-only publisher is difficult, so this [revenue] means we can try things others of a similar size wouldn’t.”

Still, Pepper’s bet that newsletters are the new morning paper seems to have paid off.

At Rough Draft, newsletters showcase the best content from the day. But that’s not simply a case of rounding up what’s on the website. “Everyone’s daily tasks are to get the newsletter out – that’s the most important thing,” said Pepper, emphasising the whole team’s newsletter-first ethos. “People love to set habits. They love repetition and predictability in the mornings.”

The newsletters then form the basis of the monthly print editions, with issues from writers in specific verticals like food and entertainment translating into columns.

Almost six years later, Rough Draft Atlanta has a portfolio of a dozen newsletters. Flagship daily newsletter Rough Draft goes out every morning six days a week. The rest, covering topics from art and food to LBGTQ+ and books go out at various times across the week in the afternoons.

It’s unusual for a smaller hyperlocal publisher to have topic-specific verticals in this way. But Pepper pointed out that print papers contain everything from local news to film reviews and recipes. So he sees the newsletter verticals as a way to then feed into the print product later on.

Rough Draft is formulaic, with the aim of giving readers an overview of everything from key local and national headlines to the weather and events. The others are more tailored in format, centering key writers and personalities.

“In Atlanta, the food scene here is like a sport,” Pepper explained, highlighting that they were able to attract EiC Beth McKibben over from national media company Eater to come and lead Side Dish. “In her old role, she was sending out a five-day-a-week newsletter that was just clickbait. Now, she’s sending out a narrative newsletter twice a week which gives her a chance to tell her stories.”

The publisher’s most recent vertical is in health and wellness. The Reset, edited by Laura Scholz, explores current health, wellness and beauty topics. “It’s a huge industry in terms of all the money that people are spending on health and wellness and longevity, so I’m excited about scaling it,” said Pepper, explaining the reasoning behind the launch.

Notably, having a newsletter-first mindset is also leading to some interesting experiments on social media. The publisher’s newsletters all now appear as Reels, with short clips and narrations summarizing the day’s key developments.

Not only does this offer a way to showcase the newsletter and its primary functions to younger audiences, but it opens up additional revenue opportunities. Daily Reel editions of the newsletter can be sponsored within the content itself, rather than relying on revenue shares with Meta or other platforms.

A premium ad offering

Local newsletters have historically been trickier to monetize than general news. Ad slots have to be budget-friendly to local businesses, but selling such ad space is often not worth the time of dedicated salespeople.

Rough Draft has been helped in this respect by having a strong base of print advertisers. But Pepper pointed out two areas they have also focused on to help drive demand. The first is having a self-serve portal for clients where they can upload, schedule, and see clicks and impressions in real time. This takes an administrative burden off sales and marketing teams, and also allows easy rebooking.

“We’ve had really great success with renewals,” Pepper added. “We’re completely transparent in what we give [advertisers], which I think for a local media company is pretty remarkable.”

However, Pepper has also refused to run programmatic advertising on either the website or the newsletters. “We just wouldn’t make any money,” he said, noting low CPMs which devalue the space. “It’s a much better user experience all round that all of our ads are local companies.”

The newsletters themselves have limited inventory. This drives up value and also makes for a better experience for readers. Pepper said that Rough Draft is getting more inbound leads from local businesses than ever, and their newsletters are sold out months in advance.

Digital revenue now accounts for 28% of overall revenue, up from 2% in 2020. This is a mix of branded content, newsletters and digital display, which is difficult to separate out as some is sold as packages.

Quality over quantity

Although growth is a priority, Pepper said that maintaining quality, engaged users is vital to keeping advertisers happy, as well as maintaining control over costs.

Rough Draft Atlanta has nearly 50,000 subscribers to its newsletters, with a 48% average open rate to its flagship daily edition. Clean lists are a priority, with people who haven’t opened in a few months put through a re-engagement cycle. If they continue to not open newsletters, their email address is archived.

Pepper also encourages the team to go out in-person to encourage newsletter growth, including engaging with festivals and local events. “We’re out at the Farmer’s Market on the first Saturday of every month, collecting email sign-ups there,” he explained. They also see some success with referral campaigns, and QR codes to the newsletters in their print product.

In the short term, the greatest growth potential for Rough Draft is in reader revenue. All its content is free, including the papers and newsletters. But the publisher has managed to increase reader revenue significantly year-over-year.

“We’ve already eclipsed what we did all of last year, and that’s running a little over 2% of our total revenue,” Pepper said. He now wants to explore member events, and adding more value for those who contribute.

Pepper said that he was figuring much of the strategy out as he went along. But he had the benefit of coming to the business at the ideal time. By 2020, it was clear that most national brands wouldn’t win the scale game, let alone a local organization. As a result, he’s never attempted programmatic or many of the other ‘quick win’ traps others fell into.

But he also spotted early on that there is still a demand for a concise, daily summary of news that matters to people’s lives. As publishers increasingly seek to leverage their audience relationships as the basis for digital growth, Pepper’s centering of this need in a newsletter product strategy has transformed them into a platform for growth, premium advertising, and digital revenue.

-smiling business executive to portray the ease of using AI for advertising workflow-

Advertising | AI | Featured Post

How Hearst uses AI to make targeted advertising smarter

July 23, 2026 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

Hearst is using AI to turn advertising RFPs into bespoke audiences in minutes with a new product that moves the company beyond targeting into strategy. AURA IQ, launched last month at Cannes, is the next evolution of AURA, the company’s proprietary first-party audience platform introduced in 2024.

The new system uses AI to translate campaign briefs into custom audience strategies at scale while continuously refining performance as campaigns run. Rather than simply matching advertisers with predefined segments, it helps identify and optimize high-value audiences throughout a campaign.

For years, publishers have viewed first-party data as a defense against third-party cookie loss, platform dependency, and declining referral traffic. Hearst’s approach points to a different future. First-party data creates competitive advantage when publishers combine trusted audience relationships with AI to turn proprietary insights into scalable advertising strategy.

From targeting tool to AI-powered platform

AURA, launched in 2024, was a first-party ad targeting tool that utilized AI-enabled technology and Hearst’s audience data to connect advertisers to engaged customers at scale. Last year, Hearst extended AURA’s reach internationally to the UK, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, to activate its first-party data across 300 million monthly visitors and more than 50 brands globally. The same year, it expanded to programmatic buyers on Amazon DSP, and to Connected TV (CTV) with AURA TV to connect advertisers with audiences across screens.

Now, AURA IQ transforms RFPs into actionable media strategies and custom audience targets for clients.

“We went from a tool to a platform,” explains Mike Nuzzo, SVP and head of data solutions and insights at Hearst Magazines. “And, I think that leap in and of itself is significant because it actually functions more like an interactive tool than just a targeting tool.”

Hearst Magazines Global Chief Revenue Officer Lisa Ryan Howard explains that the AURA IQ platform allows the company to build recommendations in a faster, smarter, more automated fashion and to uncover real time trends, anticipate market shifts and work more strategically with marketers and advertisers.

For Hearst, the biggest value of this new platform is in the upfront workflow. In a live demonstration, Hearst showed how AURA IQ can take a RFP and turn it into tailored audience recommendations and client-ready intelligence in minutes.

“It allows us to build bespoke audiences per brief, and it’s ethically done in minutes,” explains Nuzzo. “It uses all of our levers from the data side, so, audience contextual and real-time trends. And it sharpens every campaign (and) it gets better with time because we’re feeding data through it.”

Howard says the company tested the product in beta and analyzed how much time, speed and accuracy it saved the team. The answer, she says, was substantial. “It went from five days, roughly, to four minutes,” Howard says.

“I think for publishers that’s one of the most important things we can do to compete with the nimbleness of creators and the scale of the platforms,” she says. “We need to be faster. We need to be smarter. And so AI’s helping us do that.”

How AURA IQ changes Hearst’s sales workflows

Hearst says the value of AURA IQ is speed, but the bigger shift may be how that speed changes the workflow. Right now, AURA IQ automates the audience-building and insight-generation work that used to take the first several days of RFP response. Instead of humans manually matching briefs to Hearst’s content and audiences, the AURA IQ platform does that matching automatically and at scale.

It was important for Hearst to have humans involved in the process, all the way through, Howard says. “Our marketers and sales teams use this for RFP response,” she says. “The account strategists, the data analysts, the sellers then review it thoroughly in the platform and either go with it as is or make relevant edits based on their own knowledge.”

While AURA IQ improves timing and workflow, it doesn’t replace editorial or sales judgment. Humans still review and approve the output before it goes to a client.

The platform frees up time for marketers to solve the hard problems for advertisers, Nuzzo says. “This just allows us to give back some time to the human to think creatively and strategically about the whole business. [It takes] that one component that we know AI can help with and all the data that sits underneath it to help them just move this one piece of it much faster.”

Howard explains that the hardest work came before the AI layer even got built. It was an 18-month to two-year effort getting Hearst’s own systems, from ad server to order management to analytics, actually talking to each other. Only then did that first-party data become useful when the underlying systems were organized enough to support it.

For now, AURA IQ doesn’t build specific media plans. That is phase two for AURA IQ, Howard explains, saying, “Account strategists will also still be involved on the planning side to manage the actual media plans, but the automation of it is there.”

“The more you can simplify and create, as Mike calls it, a kind of federated system where different tools are communicating to each other interchangeably, that’s an unlock,” she says.

The infrastructure behind Hearst’s advertising AI

For digital media companies watching these developments, the biggest takeaway may be the workflow Hearst built around AURA IQ.

Ana Milicevic, co-founder of Sparrow Advisers, a firm that advises marketers and C-suite executives on building data products, says that publishers are testing a variety of AI tools that support operational efficiency.

“We’ll see many flavors of AI-powered offerings coming from publishers in the coming months,” she says. “The part that is likely replicable … is operational efficiency: AURA IQ seems to present a layer that facilitates RFP response, and that alone would be a time-saver for many publishers.”

AURA IQ’s core function, she notes, is speeding up RFP response, which is often a bottleneck requiring an expensive, specialized staff footprint to solve manually.

Anthony Katsur, CEO of the IAB Tech Lab, says that the most realistic uses of agentic AI in publishing right now are in discovery, curation and the creation of private marketplace deals. The best use cases, he says, are the ones that solve specific workflow problems and make existing systems smarter and more efficient.

He says other publishers could build something similar, but with a caveat. “I think it’s a brilliant approach. I think other media companies can absolutely replicate what they’re doing,” he says, “(But), you need scale. You know AI thrives on a very rich, robust data set… but other media companies of that scale, absolutely.”

He pointed to DPG Media, a Belgian media group with more than 80 brands in Belgium and the Netherlands, which launched a similar platform in March. Called Audience Discovery Agent, it is based on agentic AI and enables advertisers to quickly identify the most relevant target groups for their campaigns.

“An agentic approach is making the existing programmatic workflow smarter, more effective, more efficient,” Katsur says. “That’s how I see this evolving.”

The new competitive edge for advertising

What Hearst has built with AURA IQ points to how publishers are thinking about optimizing their internal workflows. The publisher ad tech stack is being reimagined, Milicevic explained. “In practice this will likely mean that previously key components of a publisher’s ad tech stack will be replaced, resulting in a more streamlined stack,” she says.

Katsur agrees, saying that that the broader ad stack is being rethought around AI, but the value is likely to show up first in planning and activation rather than measurement. He says publishers need to move forward with purpose, asking what problem AI is meant to solve and whether it creates real efficiency or incremental revenue. He pointed to strong use cases like reconciliation, PMP management, smarter media briefs and RFP responses.

“Is applying an LLM the best use best use case to apply AI to, or is it things like reconciliation? Is it things like again creating a management of PMPs? Is it putting together smarter media briefs or responses to RFPs from agencies?” he asks, “Those, I think, are probably higher and better use cases of AI than just automating the IO.”

AURA IQ’s emergence suggests publishers are thinking about how AI fits into their businesses, and also rethinking the infrastructure that sits underneath ad sales. The next competitive edge may come from building internal infrastructure that makes data, sales and planning work together, and lets publishers turn their data into something advertisers can use.

- concept art of lightbulb electrified by power of first party data -

Advertising | AI | Supporter Spotlight

Making first-party data work harder in the AI era

July 20, 2026 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

For decades, media companies have distributed content on the open web to inform and entertain audiences, build communities and earn ad revenue. Open web equaled open access, and advertisers and third-party measurement companies could easily access this content and analyze audience data.

AI is changing this dynamic. AI-powered search and agents are becoming intermediaries between media companies and audiences. Human traffic from the open web is declining, while traffic from AI crawlers is growing more than 300% year-over-year.

In response to this shift, media companies are making fundamental changes to the way they distribute and manage content by creating separate web pages for human and AI audiences, limiting access to AI crawlers and placing more content behind paywalls. These limitations are increasing advertisers’ need for transparency into audience quality, engagement and performance.

Here are some ways media companies can strengthen audience value, protect first party data in an AI-driven environment, and provide advertisers with greater transparency.

Build audience relationships across channels

Success in digital media has often been measured by pageviews, unique visitors and referral traffic. While those metrics remain important, they only tell part of the story.

Today audiences engage with media across websites, newsletters, podcasts, social platforms, events, apps and other channels. Each channel produces its own unique first-party data, which provides an opportunity for publishers to deepen audience engagement and offer greater value to advertisers. In fact, total aggregated reach reporting of audience is encouraged.

INMA recently highlighted several examples of how media companies leverage cross-channel audience development strategies. Texas Monthly used insights from newsletter subscribers and website engagement to launch a multichannel campaign around its popular true crime content. Wired deepened its audience connections by offering subscribers exclusive content including livestream Q&As with editors and specialized newsletters.

By sharpening focus on these owned platforms, publishers can develop a deeper understanding of audiences across all channels to further strengthen audience relationships and value.

Take greater control of your content and data

Until recently, content and audience signals on the open web were widely available to search engines, measurement providers and other third parties. As AI platforms rely more on publisher content to generate responses, publishers are becoming more selective about which organizations can access and use those assets.

Some media companies are taking steps to protect their content and data by placing more content behind walls, paid or not, creating separate experiences for AI crawlers and agents and placing bots that offer value on allow lists while denying many others. This reflects a broader shift in how media companies view their content, audiences and first-party data. These are no longer freely available resources, but are strategic assets that should be protected, managed and monetized.

Greater control of open web increases the value of these assets through scarcity of access that other media channels have enjoyed. Proving the value of direct audience relationships and first-party data becomes an important differentiator in a competitive media environment.

Develop a transparent, trusted data source of truth

As publishers place stricter controls around content and audience data while limiting scraping, including third-party content verification and measurement solutions, advertisers still need visibility into audience quality, engagement and media performance. They want to understand who they are reaching, how audiences engage across channels and whether reported metrics can be trusted.

The demand for cross-channel transparency is growing. IAB’s 2026 Outlook Study found that 72% of buyers plan to increase their focus on cross-platform measurement, up from 64% in 2025, reflecting growing demand for understanding audience engagement across channels and media environments.

Independent, third-party verification helps establish a trusted source of truth by validating cross-channel audience data at its source. Rather than relying solely on signals available on the open web, advertisers gain confidence that data is being measured, reported and governed consistently across channels behind their walls.

This transparency benefits both publishers and advertisers. Publishers can demonstrate the quality and value of their audiences while protecting their intellectual property, and advertisers gain confidence in the data used to inform media investments.

As AI reshapes content discovery and audience engagement, media companies that build direct audience relationships, maintain control over their data and provide trusted, verified metrics will be best positioned to demonstrate value to advertisers.

-runner at starting blocks to suggest getting ahead of programmatic advertising buying and selling-

Advertising | AI | Supporter Spotlight

The next programmatic advantage is agent readiness

July 15, 2026 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

Anyone in the media industry can tell you how third-party signal degradation has made traditional ad targeting less reliable. At the same time, AI has made it easier to analyze publisher data to identify high-quality audiences in a fraction of the time it takes manually.

Programmatic advertising demand increasingly flows to flow wherever inventory can be understood quickly, evaluated objectively, and activated without friction. For sellers, visibility in that process is an advantage that’s quickly becoming a necessity.

The automated ad buyer has arrived

Earlier this year, a media agency completed the first publicly-documented, fully-agentic campaign. An AI agent interpreted a client brief, queried an SSP’s inventory, evaluated options, and returned a recommendation for human approval before initiating the campaign. After launch, the agent was set to continue optimizing the campaign’s pace, targets, and performance.

This autonomous advertising campaign delivered:

82% reduction in supply chain cost
40% lift in impressions
30% lower CPM
98% average video completion rates

That’s just one example, but the results are promising — and replicable.

That SSP is now running similar programs with more agency partners. Marketing agencies are executing live agentic media buys with direct publisher connections. CTV infrastructure companies are building systems specifically to make streaming inventory accessible to agentic buyers.

What we’ve learned is that agentic buying can already reach and engage with both programmatic and direct deals. Unfortunately, teams that wait for agentic buying to mature might start falling behind.

Publishers need to compete on accessibility and speed

When buyer agents evaluate inventory, the sellers who appear first are the ones whose inventory clearly answers who you reach, how you know that, what is available, at what price, and under what conditions. An agent needs clean, clear signals to evaluate before it can act. If the signals aren’t legible, the agent will move onto inventory that is.

The manual discovery-to-activation cycle wasn’t built for machine speed. Media sellers with a strong agentic foundation will be set up to compress these timelines from weeks to minutes, giving them the ability to close more direct and programmatic deals than slower competitors.

Scale still matters for getting on a buyer’s radar. Accessibility is increasingly what determines whether you get the deal.

What the sell side is building

Buyer agents are becoming a staple of the ecosystem, but I’m keeping a close eye on the layers the sell side is developing.

Audience agents can synthesize first-party data, identify niche targets, and package inventory into structured outputs that buyer agents can evaluate directly. Sales teams can deploy those outputs in RFP responses without rebuilding audience packages manually for each cycle.

Seller agents are the next layer in development. These systems are designed to communicate and transact directly with buyer agents. This will compress the direct deal cycle from negotiation across weeks to structured exchanges in minutes.

Even before the agents start autonomously transacting, sellers who prioritize their identity infrastructure and agentic tooling are positioned to benefit. Sell-side agents can improve direct sales workflows and ensure buyer agents will be able to evaluate their inventory well before the exchange starts.

The standards defining the agentic advertising system

Open protocols, like the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP), which define how agents discover inventory, describe audiences, and transact with each other, are still in development. But they’re rapidly maturing, and major players are hedging their bets on the standards that will best suit their needs.

What I find most interesting about this moment is that publishers still have a say in what comes next. These protocols will impact how your inventory is represented in an agent query, how pricing is structured, and how brand safety and consent signals are exchanged.

The companies running agentic tests now are shaping how agentic advertising will look. However, those who wait will inherit a framework built around someone else’s inventory.

Where publishers should focus

I’d recommend taking steps to take as soon as you’re able:

1. Audit your data foundation for agent readiness

A self-assessment is the best place to start. Score your organization across the dimensions of agent readiness, including: your data, inventory signals, content and context signals, technical infrastructure, and organizational awareness. An agent readiness self-assessment is a good way to find out where you stand and what you need to prioritize.

2. Deploy audience agents in monitored workflows

From there, the clearest opportunity involves deploying audience agents against your existing direct sales workflow. You can start with one property or deal type before a broader rollout. Measuring against your current baseline is how you’ll know what’s working.

3. Assign a team member to an agentic standards working group

On standards, I’d get someone into the AdCP and MP working groups sooner rather than later. You need a representative who understands your deal structure well enough to read a proposal and identify what works with your business and what could pose some issues.

The demand shift is underway. Buyer agents are already querying inventory, the sell-side is building the stack to meet them, and working groups are writing the standards that will govern how they transact. Publishers who build now, rather than treating it as a problem for later, will be the ones buyer agents find first. They’ll also be in a position of strength, shaping where the industry is headed at this time of rapid change.

-two business people at the edge of a train platform with mind the gap written to illustrate the video video infrastructure gap-

Revenue | Supporter Spotlight | Video

The operational gap holding back video revenue growth

June 29, 2026 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

As Google referral traffic has declined, social has become a more important source of audience engagement for media companies. Facebook remains a meaningful traffic driver, but the larger opportunity for both traffic and monetization now sits across video-based social platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Most media executives already understand that shift. The challenge is executing against it.

That is because video-based social is operationally harder than it looks. The platforms are not interchangeable. Each has its own formats, audience behaviors, and optimization dynamics. At the same time, the content and workflows inside most media organizations are fragmented. Video lives in different places, different teams manage different surfaces, and systems built for web publishing do not easily scale to a cross-platform video strategy.

So the question is not whether or not social video matters. It is what publishers need to operate effectively across video-based social platforms.

Publishers need unified video infrastructure

Social video is no longer just a top-of-funnel traffic driver; it is becoming a real monetization channel for publishers. Facebook and YouTube are the clearest examples today, with direct revenue programs that reward engagement, views, and optimized video distribution. Media brands should care because they already possess valuable video assets, but most lack the infrastructure, workflows, and platform-specific strategy needed to turn that content into meaningful revenue.

The answer is not another point solution or manual workaround. It is a modern operating infrastructure: a unified library for video assets, the ability to transform content for each platform, distribution that matches the pace of the feed, and the data to understand what is working across versions and surfaces.

Unified Library

Most media companies cannot manage video holistically because their assets are scattered across the organization. Horizontal video may sit with editorial, vertical clips with social, finished segments in one system, and B-roll in another. When content lives in different places, every downstream step gets harder. A unified library is the starting point: one place to find, manage, and work from the full library of video assets. You cannot transform, distribute, or measure what you cannot find.

Content transformation

A single source asset has to become multiple versions for multiple platforms. What works on TikTok may not work on YouTube or Instagram, and each platform has its own format, pacing, and optimization logic. That makes transformation a core operational requirement, not an occasional editing task. Media companies need the ability to adapt content for each environment in a repeatable way, so scaling output does not mean rebuilding the workflow every time.

Intelligent distribution

Distribution is not just about pushing content out. It is about matching each version of an asset to the platform it is built for. Because each platform behaves differently and attracts different audiences, distribution has to account for its cadence and mechanics. Publishers need the ability to move quickly while still optimizing for how each surface works. Otherwise, distribution becomes another manual bottleneck, and the window for performance closes before the content has a chance to work.

Unified data and lineage

Publishers also need a data layer that shows what is working across versions and surfaces. That includes lineage: the ability to trace a clip back to its source, understand how it was transformed, see where it ran, and evaluate what it produced. Without that visibility, performance is reduced to isolated metrics and disconnected reports. With it, publishers can learn from what is working, make better decisions, and improve results over time.

Why organizational design matters

Technology alone will not solve the operational problem. Editorial, audience development, social, and monetization may each work well within their own lanes and still produce a fragmented outcome. The challenge cuts across the org chart, and so do the goals: more reach, more efficient production, and more value from every asset.

That makes this an ownership issue, not just a tooling one. If no one owns the full motion, content stays scattered, workflows break between teams, and execution slows down just when speed matters most. Some media companies may find they need to centralize not only the technology, but the team responsible for making video-based social work.

Why point solutions fall short

The instinct is often to solve the problem one gap at a time: a clipping tool here, a scheduler there, an analytics layer somewhere else. But every disconnected tool adds operational cost. Someone still has to move assets between systems, reconcile workflows across teams, and hold the process together manually.

That is the real limitation of point solutions. They may solve a narrow task, but they do not solve the broader operational problem of managing video holistically across teams, formats, and platforms. As the number of assets, users, and surfaces grows, that fragmentation becomes more expensive, not less.

For teams already under pressure to do more with less, that cost is not theoretical. It shows up in missed opportunities, duplicated effort, and workflows that do not scale. When no one can afford more inefficiency, adding disconnected tooling only deepens it.

Shifting thinking

Most media executives already know social video matters. The shift that remains is to stop treating it as a collection of one-off tasks and start running it as a unified operating system, with one library feeding repeatable transformation, intelligent distribution, and unified data under clear organizational ownership. Build that infrastructure and the economics change: value that once leaked through fragmented systems starts to compound.

Social video is an operational problem, and the organizations that solve it that way will capture the opportunity.

-an "attention factory" to represent internet economics that shows how publishers create value but the duopoly extracts the revenue-

AI | Featured Post | Policy

A $500 billion reminder of how the duopoly wins the internet

June 4, 2026 Jason Kint, CEO – DCN

A remarkable milestone just slipped by without a peep from industry pundits. In the last quarter, Google and Meta surpassed an annual run rate of one half of a trillion dollars in advertising revenues.

That number should have stopped us in our tracks. It did me.

$500 billion: Literally, half of the global advertising market.

It has been over a decade since DCN first identified the “duopoly” as a force which, if left unchecked, would increasingly extract value from publishers while capturing over 90% of the industry growth quarter after quarter after quarter. There have since been regulatory actions, congressional hearings, privacy scandals, whistleblowers, and countless debates about the power of the dominant platforms. Entire industries, including media winners and losers, have been ransacked and reshaped based on their decisions. Yet, it’s hard to argue that this course of dominance and destruction has changed in any meaningful way.

The courts are still working through cases that began years ago. The FTC continues its efforts against Meta. Google remains entangled in multiple antitrust actions. Meaningful remedies, if they come at all, will likely take years more.

But the money continues to flow.

Antitrust efforts fail to rectify internet economics

That half-trillion-dollar milestone tells us something important. Despite a decade of scrutiny, remarkably little has changed about who captures the value of media created across the open internet.

One of the more surreal moments for me came in late 2018 when Google contacted me personally to explain why Facebook was different and the real problem. The irony wasn’t lost on me then, and it isn’t now. Though the two companies publicly positioned themselves as rivals, we later learned that they were allegedly secretly working together to rig the ad market and damage publishers. CEO Sundar Pichai’s 2025 deposition regarding his discussions with Mark Zuckerberg remain under seal. If not for the Texas attorney general’s ongoing case, we might never see it. Time will tell.

Yet the industry press has largely moved on. Last week’s FTC appeal in its effort to unwind Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp barely registered. Perhaps that’s understandable. Court proceedings move slowly, and the media industry does not have that luxury.

How audience intelligence became the internet’s most valuable asset

But none of this has really been about advertising.

Advertising was simply the funding mechanism.

The real issue has been about who creates value and who captures it. As we wrote back in 2016, the dominant platforms built their market power through unprecedented data collection. They track users across their own properties, but more importantly across the broader web. As content is consumed, they harvest signals continuously – learning where we go, what we read, what we watch, what we search for, and what we might do next to fuel advertising and search results.

Publishers made the investments, but it was the platforms that captured these signals.

That distinction matters.

News orgs invest in reporting and journalists. Entertainment companies invest in storytelling and creators. Together, they invest in the content, experiences, and environments that attract audiences and earn trust.

The platforms just discovered something even more profitable than creating content: what they could observe about the people consuming it.

Every search, click, view, purchase signal, mobile location, and behavioral pattern became part of an expanding system of surveillance and targeting. The value being captured was not the content itself. It was the relationship between audiences and content. It was the context surrounding attention; the intelligence generated whenever consumers engaged with trusted brands. The more content was created across the open web, the more opportunities to collect behavioral information to tune advertising products and monopolized distribution feeds.

One side created value while the other side built extraordinarily profitable businesses around efficiently observing and monetizing that value.

Back in 2016, DCN was the first org willing to challenge this model directly. We argued that surveillance-based business models were creating structural distortions weakening the economic foundations that support trusted news and premium content. At the time, many viewed those concerns as alarmist. Others dismissed them as anti-technology.

A decade later, many of those same concerns now sit at the center of antitrust cases around the world. Yet as the legal system catches up to the first era of the internet, the industry is already confronting the next.

AI is being built on the broken economics of the platform era

Speaking this week at the World News Media Congress, New York Times Publisher AG Sulzberger delivered one of the clearest warnings yet about the economic consequences of AI for journalism. While his focus was on the unauthorized use of copyrighted content, the broader pattern he described was familiar: powerful intermediaries extracting value from creators while weakening the economic foundations that make original work possible. In many ways, it represents the next chapter of the same story.

Yes, without a doubt, the next phase is AI. And it is unleashing amazing opportunities that publishers are leaning into. But it’s also attempting to execute on the same playbook of ransacking “data” with impunity and monetizing it somewhere else more profitable to the platform. If the first phase of platforms harvested the value created in front of and around the content, then this AI phase increasingly seeks to harvest the content itself.

And many of the angels born of the open web are now pivoting towards profiting from AI, too.

Which brings me to Common Crawl.

Today, DCN sent a formal legal notice to Common Crawl, one of the largest repositories of web content used throughout the AI ecosystem. The notice raises serious concerns regarding the collection, retention, and redistribution of publishers’ protected content without authorization. It challenges a growing assumption that content created through substantial investment can be collected, stored, repurposed, and monetized simply because it is technically accessible. And just last week Common Crawl announced a deal with Hugging Face to make that embrace of enabling copyright infringement by for-profit AI companies and developers even more seamless.

However, this is not really about a single organization. It is about a mindset that has become embedded throughout parts of the AI ecosystem.

If it can be scraped, it can be used. If it can be used, it can be monetized. The dominant platforms have spent years reducing users, context, and content into a single catch-all term: data. Once everything becomes data, the creator, the brand disappears from the equation. Or maybe more accurately, it can be hijacked into an algorithm at scale without the undesirable expense of journalists, storytellers, institutional trust and liability.

Remember: We’ll see $500 billion extracted from this “data” this year alone.

Journalism is not data. Articles are not data. A video is not data. These are investments in expertise, human creativity, and trustworthiness. They are assets created through risk, talent, and capital. Data is merely the binary bits of the internet underneath them. By reducing everything to data, the act of content creation vanishes, and the question of who deserves to be compensated becomes easier to overlook.

That is why the debate surrounding AI shouldn’t be merely a technology debate. It is an economic debate. It’s a debate about whether those who create value will continue to get the short end of the stick to those who capture it.

Sulzberger’s warning is therefore about much more than journalism. It is about whether society still recognizes where value originates. As he noted in his remarks, less than 1% of the AI investment flows to the content that trains these systems, while hundreds of billions are being directed toward the three other basic ingredients: energy, compute, and engineering talent.

Answering the unresolved question at the center of the digital economy

For 25 years, the digital economy has often rewarded those who capture value much more richly than those who create it. The antitrust battles involving Google and Meta may eventually address some of the excesses of the first internet era. The copyright, licensing, and governance battles surrounding AI will help shape the second.

The first era monetized our behavior. The next aims to replace our content.

Both stem from the same unresolved question:

Will we continue treating human creativity, expertise, and audience relationships as raw material to be harvested by others? Or will we finally recognize that every advertising system, every dataset, and every AI model ultimately depends on people and trusted institutions willing to create original value in the first place?

The half-trillion-dollar advertising milestone should not be viewed as a business achievement alone. It is a scoreboard. Yes, the emerging technology boom may be different. But until we answer that question, little else will change.

-white room with video and data streaming concept for data clean room and CTV advertising-

Advertising | Supporter Spotlight | Video

Can clean rooms tidy up transparency for Streaming TV?

June 1, 2026 Todd Randak, GM of CTV – DoubleVerify

Now that streaming has surpassed linear TV in total viewership and is poised to take the lead in ad spend by 2028, it’s time to look at it as more than just another channel in a video marketing strategy. It’s now, quite simply, the channel. Streaming audiences around the world continue to grow in both size and dedication, and the opportunity to reach them has never been more appealing. But as appeal rises, so do buyer expectations that an investment in streaming TV’s premium ad placements will be rewarded with high-quality performance backed by transparent and reliable data. While this is an area where streaming TV has struggled to meet the rest of the industry, one particular solution may help it get back on track: data clean rooms.

The transparency problem

Data transparency is hardly an unreasonable request these days. Most media buyers have come to rely on table stakes quality metrics like viewability, brand suitability, and fraud rate to verify performance and justify spend. While digital publishers and supply and demand-side platforms can offer visibility down to a line-item level, streaming TV providers are hard-pressed to deliver in a similar way.

Granularity in the streaming space comes in two main forms: app-level and program or content-level. App-level offers context on the app where an ad was served, while content-level refers to the specific content being consumed. This includes user-agnostic information like genre, episode, and maturity rating; all of which are highly relevant to driving an advertiser’s quality KPIs.

Media buyers often lack this information, leading to mixed results. DV’s own measurement data shows that out of every 100 CTV ads measured, only 66 were served in a streaming TV environment rather than a CTV, gaming, music, DOOH, or utility app. That level of discrepancy could cost billions in misplaced spend. While that’s a significant problem, finding a solution has proven difficult due to a number of constraints streaming providers face.

1. Reinterpreted legislation

One of the snags for streaming platforms is older laws like the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA). Created in 1988, the VPPA was originally intended to prevent videotape providers from disclosing their customers’ viewership history without their informed written consent. But the law was reapplied in the 2010s in several lawsuits against streaming providers for sharing viewer data with third parties for measurement purposes. While those lawsuits have been inconsistent in establishing clear privacy lanes for the streaming TV industry, the VPPA as a whole remains an obstacle to providers when collaborating with their partners and independent vendors on data.

2. Lack of standardization

Another hurdle is the absence of uniform measurement and delivery standards across devices, apps, and media. Many platforms approach data processes independently, creating an ecosystem of islands that make it difficult for advertisers to define what constitutes a quality impression. However, this area has seen progress in recent years.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) created the Advanced TV Initiative, which aims to establish a common process, not only for how streaming TV approaches measurement and attribution, but also for linear TV outlets. Other organizations like the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) and GoAddressable are also advancing this cause on a number of fronts, from developing new universal watermarking standards to producing reports and best practices that improve how buyers navigate the space.

3. Inventory terms & data restrictions

As a condition of distribution, smart TV operators typically require streaming apps to surrender a share of their inventory in exchange for platform placement. But while platforms receive that inventory, streaming apps — particularly those carrying premium content — routinely restrict what program-level information can flow downstream to buyers. The result is an inventory pool that is technically measurable but contextually blind because advertisers know an ad was served, but not what it ran against.

Where data clean rooms fit in

Data clean rooms are already widely deployed for audience and outcomes measurement, planning and activation. But they can also offer practical solutions to multiple problems in the streaming space. They allow streaming providers to give their partners the data they need to verify performance and establish transparency in a way that removes potentially sensitive audience information from the equation. This allows streaming providers to live up to their promises to their audiences and partners; all while strengthening relationships and maintaining compliance with state and national regulations.

Data clean rooms function as self-contained digital lockboxes. Platforms and advertisers feed their data into the system, which then independently analyzes and matches both datasets against each other. Then, the joined data is compiled into anonymized reports and distributed for measurement purposes. Both sides get what they need to continue doing business in a way that aligns with privacy considerations. But while they seem like an ideal solution in theory, the execution has taken some practice.

For many early adopters, clean room solutions were often built in-house. In addition to being expensive to build and maintain, they were tailored to the specifications of individual suppliers. This compounded the data island problem and made fragmentation worse. But since third-party alternatives have entered the marketplace, streaming TV providers have gained access to clean room solutions that can directly address their transparency problem, along with the means to ground their efforts in impartial and fully standardized measurement capabilities.

Despite its historic growth, it’s clear that streaming TV’s best days are still to come. But it’s also clear that more work is needed for providers and advertisers to fully capitalize on that growth and build longer, stronger partnerships together. Independent data clean rooms enable that while allowing both sides to collaborate and contribute data in an effective and privacy-friendly way. As streaming nears the pinnacle of the video industry, that’s certainly an outcome worth working towards.

About the author

Todd Randak is DoubleVerify’s GM of CTV. He leads DoubleVerify’s streaming TV initiatives, including DV’s Certified Transparent Streaming program and the company’s adoption of Open Measurement (OM SDK) for CTV. His insight has been featured in Forbes, and he is a regular speaker at industry events including CES and IAB NewFronts.

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The new playbook for media companies

About the author

How we got here

Direct deals at programmatic speed

Or the same tolls at machine speed

What fair agentic economics should look like

The buy-side won’t wait

The next era of advertising

About the Author

A significant loophole

From antitrust remedy to market rule

We need a law, not a six-year fix

Video ad dollars continue to move

Business outcomes increasingly influence the buy

AI moves deeper into advertising decisions

Social overtakes search, and it’s reshaping what advertisers expect from a platform.

Video keeps compounding, and it’s where advertiser attention is consolidating.

What this means for digital media leaders going into the rest of the year.

About the author

A focus on digital opportunities

A newsletter-first business

From a daily newsletter to a portfolio of personalities

A premium ad offering

Quality over quantity

From targeting tool to AI-powered platform

How AURA IQ changes Hearst’s sales workflows

The infrastructure behind Hearst’s advertising AI

The new competitive edge for advertising

Build audience relationships across channels

Take greater control of your content and data

Develop a transparent, trusted data source of truth

The automated ad buyer has arrived

Publishers need to compete on accessibility and speed

What the sell side is building

The standards defining the agentic advertising system

Where publishers should focus

1. Audit your data foundation for agent readiness

2. Deploy audience agents in monitored workflows

3. Assign a team member to an agentic standards working group

Publishers need unified video infrastructure

Unified Library

Content transformation

Intelligent distribution

Unified data and lineage

Why organizational design matters

Why point solutions fall short

Shifting thinking

Antitrust efforts fail to rectify internet economics

How audience intelligence became the internet’s most valuable asset

AI is being built on the broken economics of the platform era

The transparency problem

1. Reinterpreted legislation

2. Lack of standardization

3. Inventory terms & data restrictions

Where data clean rooms fit in

About the author