Is the Open Web Dying?

Scott and Jana on knowing your audience. The free traffic is drying up, and the readers who stay are worth more than the ones who pass through. How publishers move people through the circles of influence from attention to advocacy, why that influence is what advertisers are buying, and what Barry Diller’s playbook for People Inc says about running a publisher like a brand.

Scott and Jana on whether the open web is dying. Jeff Green’s op-ed, why advertisers keep choosing walled gardens, the conversion API that could close the gap, Apple’s ID crackdown as an opening for publishers, and Jana’s publisher co-op idea. Plus the hard eight: the shortest sprint from Black Friday to Christmas.

Scott and Jana on Prebid’s proposed auction flip, with the ad server bidding into Prebid Server instead of the other way around. How the super auction really picks a winner today, why reservation tech is the missing piece and who could build it, whether Google has any excuse to stay out of Prebid Server, and what a non-technical publisher should do about it (nothing alone, your partners will carry it). Plus Google’s AI licensing checks: take the money, then make everyone else pay too.

Scott and Jana on agentic direct. Not a better programmatic pipe: campaigns negotiated by agents and booked straight into the publisher's ad server. Scott makes the case that it hands pricing power back to publishers, Jana asks the questions, and together they get into who could build the marketplaces, what has to come true for any of it to work, and how to be agentic direct ready before the money shows up.

A special replay. For AdExchanger Talks' 500th episode, the guests were our own Scott and Jana, so this week we're sharing that session with our listeners, with a new intro. Judge Brinkema's decision not to break up GAM, Google's impression-counting change, and GAM's new data co-op versus publisher-led collectives. Thanks to AdExchanger for putting us on the couch for a change.

Scott and Jana on configuration management. What these platforms actually control on your page, how yield testing went from a full team to one tool, the downside of buying a Ferrari you don't have the staff to drive, whether you're big enough to need one, and how to tell a feature that helps you run the business from one that's just cool. Plus the rule for every vendor demo: you can't push a PDF.

Scott and Jana on RPM versus LTV. Why RPM was never a health metric and was never supposed to be, why most publishers had no lifetime value to measure when Google was the only customer that counted, how to start building LTV across sites, newsletters, apps, and social, and why paying for traffic isn't a dirty word.

Scott and Jana on sales houses. NBC News just handed its programmatic display to Taboola, and the in-house/outsource cycle is turning again. What the deal really signals, what a publisher gives up and what they don't, the rise of hybrid stacks, and what to do whether you're moving onto a sales house or off one.

Scott and Jana on Google's bidding change. Campaigns that used to beat their target CPAs now drift up toward them, and buyers are getting a taste of what publishers have lived with for years. Easy buttons, black boxes, the MRC's new auction standards, and the case for keeping humans in the loop.

Scott and Jana on PMPs and what "private" actually means (hint: just not open). Marketplace deals versus one-to-one publisher deals, why almost every bid request now carries a deal ID, what a big CPG buyer says custom deals actually get them, and why the PMP sales team may be due for a comeback.