The first half of this decade has left publishers reeling from a pandemic jab and an AI uppercut that rearranged our reality and knocked us to our knees.
Some publishers didn’t survive these challenges, but the grind has chiseled those that remain into lean, mean EBITDA machines that are more nimble and capable of scaling new growth.
Crawling off the mat, publishers are checking back into the fight. The macro-market sentiment for 2025 is generally positive, which means marketers will have more cash for advertising. Put simply, CPMs will go up.
Some are calling 2025 “The Year of Outcomes.” But for publishers, this will be “The Year of Finding Out.”
Vertical video arrives to the party
In 2025, more publishers will experiment with vertical video formats, and more vendors will provide infrastructure for video player utility and monetization. Meanwhile, buyers will benefit from the opportunity to spread their budgets beyond the walled gardens.
Note that not a single digital publisher lamented the TikTok “outage.” They saw it as an opportunity.
Publishers make great video content, but their distribution product has always lacked scale. The swipeable video feed format popularized by TikTok has proven to be engaging and profitable. But it has always been mired in the problems of other platforms: The monetization is scant, the tools are sparse and the fear of a rug pull weighs heavily on the soul.
Now that users are preconditioned to engage with feed-style video carousels, publishers should absolutely mimic this highly addictive feature. Besides keeping the engagement on-site, a publisher can run their own monetization stack on the content as well. It’s time to upgrade that sticky video player unit and provide a unique, familiar and engaging experience.
The supply-side advantage
In 2025, we are going to see buy-side tech continue to gravitate toward the supply side for its vastly superior granularity and specificity of signal. We already saw The Trade Desk (TTD) pick up Sincera for its ability to provide eyesight of supply-side signals, which gives TTD the next best thing to actually being on the supply side.
However, the ongoing shift to supply-side decisioning means we have not yet hit peak curation discourse.
Supply-side curation within SSPs has staying power because it hits on a central concern in all of ad tech: the battle for control over how and where media is transacted. Not only does supply-side curation rebalance the Media Decisioning Power Dynamic, it also provides renewed confidence in the open auction, private marketplaces and custom data solutions. Publishers benefiting from curation will naturally have cleaner supply paths.
Expect significant movement of DSPs going directly to the publisher’s wrapper with varying degrees of success. With its new Eye of Sincera, The Trade Desk will have increased confidence moving forward with OpenPath integrations. If curation gets big enough, publishers will start slimming down their ads.txt files in favor of SSPs that can bring them unique demand. Curators should form relationships with these publishers before they get squeezed out from premium inventory.
Multi-sided exchanges, especially those with managed service functionality, will lean on their supply advantage to market their vertically integrated operation. Closing the buy-sell gap will not only compress buy-side margins; it will dislodge an entrenched need for antiquated styles of brand suitability and fraud management.
Fingerprints on the cookie jar
It’s hard to ignore the omnipresent practice of probabilistic matching when talking about cookie replacement solutions. In 2025, we’ll find out to what extent those post-cookie solutions are underpinned by fingerprinting, as Big Tech companies continue their privacy crusades.
In pursuit of resilient replacement solutions, vendors that engage in any means of probabilistically matching to deterministic IDs have left their prints all over the cookie jar. Specifically, when it comes to bid enrichment, the middle of ad tech loves the sugary high of selling freshly baked “cookies,” and publishers don’t mind the extra revenue that comes with these enhanced bid requests. But all is not well. The buy side has not yet formed an opinion on the value of enrichment, and publishers are absolutely apoplectic about the cost models of most black-box enrichment services.
Expect ID graph providers to directly offer publishers a DIY solution that is more transparent and affordable (i.e., a SaaS model). This new approach will allow sellers to more precisely control their enrichment practices, laying the groundwork for a comprehensive addressability strategy that supports durable identity resolution, data collaboration and measurement solutions.
This year will also bring a river of state privacy legislation muddying publisher operations and a flood of lawsuits scrutinizing every angle they can imagine. Make a resolution to start your data diet and get your privacy habits under control.
Don’t just trust the IAB Tech Lab – get involved!
Recently, the IAB Tech Lab made significant releases that directly impacted publisher revenue streams, including its guidance around OpenRTB’s new video.plcmt spec and ID bridging.
The Tech Lab is planning more releases around curation, retail media and CTV work streams.
Since the Tech Lab is “of the people,” it functions like local government, with all kinds of self-interested townies vying for their POV to win the day. Don’t sit idly by and assume that you’ll like the eventual outcomes dictated by these incentivized parties.
Publishers of all shapes and sizes must show up and participate in Tech Lab working groups if they want ad tech tools that can collectively move publishers forward.
Ad tech brings yield to retail media
Marketers are very comfortable wielding ROAS as a metric for clients, but they aren’t so familiar with the term “yield” when it comes to their own sites.
Yield is about squeezing more juice from the machine and helps sellers understand monetization at a more holistic level. Yes, you have to deliver ROAS for your client. But you must drive yield to hit your own company goals.
The most advanced and successful retail media networks are hiring ad tech talent from the sell side because publishers are maniacal about operations that drive yield. That means 2025 is a great year to move into retail, or to hire from ad tech. Your CFO will thank you.
More quick hits for 2025
Here are some other micro-trends and emerging challenges for publishers:
- It’s still early days for ads in large language models, but there is traction. Publishers should lean into coexisting with generative search and AI.
- Monetization stacks are becoming commoditized. This will be the biggest year yet in terms of unbundling in-house programmatic teams and the rise of managed services.
- Certain paid traffic will get a reprieve in 2025. MFA’s made-for-arbitrage model won’t be making a comeback, but there are other, more justified and above-board reasons for publishers to pay for visitors.
Down but not out
The second half of this decade cannot possibly be any wilder than the first, and publishers have seen the worst punches the market has to throw at us.
Meanwhile, M&A is heating up, DSPs are cozying up to quality inventory, marketers are pumping budgets and publishers are exploring new digital frontiers. It’s time to get back in the ring, because we’re not finished yet.
See you in the spreadsheets!
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community.
Follow Messer Media and AdExchanger on LinkedIn.
For more articles featuring Scott Messer, click here.
