🐺 Publishers: The Favorite Meal at Adtech’s All-You-Can-Eat Buffet

🚨 Spoiler alert: The petting zoo is closed. The wolves now run the restaurant. And guess who’s still on the menu?

At the Adtech Economic Forum this past week, Jonathan Roberts from Dotdash Meredith finally said the quiet part out loud. He wasn’t subtle, and frankly, he didn’t need to be.

Publishers have always been seen by #adtech as “herd animals — natural prey.”

The open web? It’s alive, sure, but much like a prizefighter in round twelve — still swinging but ready to drop. And while publishers stagger around waiting for adtech to patch it up, Roberts reminded everyone of the obvious:

Adtech won’t fix the open web for publishers.
They’ll fix it for themselves — and the publishers will get the bill.

🐑 The Sheep Keep Coming Back to the Slaughterhouse

For over a decade, publishers have played the same tragic role — the hardworking sheep in a system built by wolves, waiting to be "sheared." Only, it’s not just wool being taken anymore. It’s blood, sweat, and entire revenue streams.

Let’s break it down:

✅ You fund the newsrooms.
✅ You build and maintain the audiences.
✅ You take all the reputational risk.
✅ You foot the bills for journalism, hosting, UX, and content creation.

❌ Yet somehow, you walk away with the crumbs.

It’s not even a clever scam anymore — it’s institutionalized pickpocketing dressed up in buzzwords.

Middlemen have perfected the con, and publishers? Still showing up with that optimistic look, hoping for a fair cut this time, while adtech companies are sharpening knives behind the scenes.

🧙‍♂️ Curation: The Latest Carnival Trick (with a Few Tightrope Walkers Who Get It)

Then came the next “big fix” for publisher woes — curation — dressed up in sequins and pitched in boardrooms like it’s the second coming of yield optimization. The promises sounded like something straight from a trade show fever dream:
👉 “Curation will unlock hidden value!”
👉 “It will finally clean up the spaghetti mess of the supply chain!”
👉 “It’ll return power (and dollars) to publishers!”

And yet, for most, the reality has been the same tired punchline: publishers got a pat on the head, a LinkedIn webinar invite, and a pocketful of lint.

Sure, there are a handful of savvy operators out there. Some publishers — the ones with real skin in the data game — are threading the needle. They’re leveraging first-party data, cutting bespoke deals, and building curation strategies with teeth. But here’s the thing:

The vast majority?
They have no clue what they’re even curating.

For every success story, there are dozens of publishers wandering around trying to “curate” inventory without understanding what that even means beyond a sales deck buzzword. Most are trapped inside yet another layer of programmatic fog, serving as unwilling extras in someone else’s revenue play.

As Ryan Pauley from Vox Media pointed out, even the big guys — the ones with in-house SSPs and robust data stacks — aren’t seeing anything close to the promised “lift.” If Vox, a veritable tech-enabled publishing fortress, can’t make it rain with curation, what chance does a smaller outlet or independent media brand have?

Meanwhile, the real winners? The same adtech middlemen who’ve pivoted from failed DMPs to self-proclaimed “curation specialists.” They’ve dusted off their suits, strutted into pitches like royalty, and are now soaking up advertiser budgets like it’s their last night in Vegas.

For publishers stuck on the outside looking in, it’s yet another reminder:
You built the show.
They’re still running the ticket booth.

🎰 SPO: Supply Path Optimization or "Slightly Polished Obfuscation"?

Enter SPO, Supply Path Optimization — which, depending on who’s pitching it, is either a sleek efficiency engine or just another buzzword salad masking the same old grift.

The promise: clean up the clutter, reduce unnecessary hops, boost publisher take-rates.
The reality: fewer hops, same wolves.

Here’s the big dirty secret:
Even after years of SPO efforts, publishers are still losing 40% to 60% of every ad dollar. And when you get into the weeds, it’s worse.
One SSP? Caught keeping 98 cents on the dollar and acting like they were doing publishers a favor.

That’s not optimization.
That’s a mugging in broad daylight — but with a PowerPoint deck and a chiseled logo.

And yet, here we are. Another industry panel, another speaker promising that SPO 2.0 will somehow deliver the dream — “this time for real.”

🎩 Buzzwords: The True Currency of Adtech

Let’s play everyone's favorite game:
Adtech Buzzword Bingo.

✨ Transparency
✨ Synergy
✨ AI-powered, blockchain-fueled, privacy-first optimization

It’s like a conference room séance: close your eyes, chant the words, and hope no one notices the emperor isn’t just naked — he’s selling you the robe.

Transparency? Please. Publishers can barely see who’s even in the auction, let alone where their margins are going. “Privacy-first” means more opaque black-box solutions built to “protect” users while somehow still hoarding publisher data and leaving them holding the bill.

💉 Margin Compression as Performance Art

While the wolves fatten up, publishers have been in a downward spiral of desperation:
🔻 Jamming every page with more ad slots
🔻 Running pre-rolls, mid-rolls, and end-rolls until users rage quit
🔻 Embedding third-party trackers like it’s a clearance sale

All of this in a desperate attempt to recover lost margin.
The result?
An open web that looks like Times Square at 2 AM — blinking, bloated, and selling anything to survive.

Meanwhile, real journalism? Starved.
User trust? Evaporated.
Publisher revenue? Still stuck somewhere south of the bargain bin.

🦴 So What Now?

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
Adtech isn’t broken.
It’s working exactly as designed — for adtech.

Middlemen have no incentive to fix this.
They’re too busy refilling their plates at the buffet, while publishers wander around wondering why the carving station only serves lamb — and guess who’s on the platter.

If publishers want to stop being the entrée, they’ll have to:
⚔️ Take back control of their data
⚔️ Rebuild direct brand relationships
⚔️ Break the addiction to third-party handouts

Otherwise?
The buffet’s still open.
The wolves are still hungry.
And publishers? Still walking around like it’s a petting zoo.

🍴 Welcome to the adtech buffet. Grab a fork — just in case you need to defend yourself.