The New Math of Publisher Monetization in the AI Era - Web Without Walls

From Early Days to AI Era: Jason White's Ad Tech Evolution Welcome to another episode of Weber dot Walls, where we explore the ship's free shipping attack and publish revenue. Our guest today is someone who has spent more than a decade at the central publishing platforms and monetization, with a track record of blending innovation and execution. Jason is the CEO of Mola, a company building the infrastructure publishers need to unlock new revenue models and navigate an increasingly complex ecosystem. Yes, help publishers advance their monetization strategies and push the industry to rethink how value is created and captured. Excited to dig into his perspective on what's next for publishers and the open web. Jason, welcome to Web without walls. Let's get into it. You've spent more than a decade in AT tech. You've been a startup founder. You work with public companies, you work with scale platforms. You work as a publisher. You're one of the most admired people in AT tech. Could you give us a quick intro about your last ten years or your last decade attack for our audience? Speaker 2 Yeah, Thanks, Vijay. So first of all, humbled by that. I I've just always kind of opened up the vein and followed it. The thing that's attracted me to digital media publishing over the last decade plus has been a decade as kind. It's been longer than that, but but it's it's keeping the web free. Yeah, I I didn't grow up in a background that, you know, I had access to the wealth. And back in my day it was encyclopedias, which was knowledge. So I spent a lot of time in libraries as a kid. And so when the World Wide Web came out at the.com boom in the early 2000s and even into the 10s, it was all about giving people access to information and democratizing information. And ads did that. A digital web publishing did that. So that's always been at my core, and particularly over the past decade. So I worked more heavily with digital media publishers and and built an innovative products and technologies that help them achieve that end. Speaker 1 And you've been in this space and you've seen a lot of shift happen, right, especially over the last decade working with preference powering publishers. What is your unique perspective given being something that's specific that people who've been as an executive in a public company, you're also being executive at private companies, you'll also have the startup experience in. What do you think about today's landscape as of today? Speaker 2 I I think it's commensurate with with where it's really kind of gone over the past couple of decades. Like when you kind of look at where we've come from, we started with manually inserting ads on pages. We started with there being myriad different ad servers that had different, you know, protocols or measurement capabilities and which is really kind of the genesis, the IB, right? You had the era. There are different eras, to kind of quote Taylor Swift, you had the AD network era and, you know, those were kind of managing for digital media publishers. They would manage those tags and waterfalls. Not very ideal because not every single advertiser spoke to one another. And then we had the era of programmatic, right? So that was a big shift. And we were at the core of that at Fox Audience Network as we invented our TV. So we really saw that kind of space explode, you know, people that didn't really have business models on the demand side that retargeting ad behavioral ad networks pivoted into being demand side platforms. So it's like Criteo folks like media math, the trade desk, kind of, you know, started taking off in and around that time. So, you know, those were big shifts. And then we've seen shifts with, you know, like little micro kind of shifts in and around like outstream in stream header bidding. Those things were also kind of, you know, changes shift. So from my perspective, I, I kind of feel like we've always been a bit like frogs in boiling water. There's just been constant change. This next change is a is a big change, but I don't I really see it being more different than the change when we ushered in the Http://protocol era of of the Internet versus traditional magazines and newspapers, print, etcetera. Speaker 1 Interesting. And you're you're saying is it is more different than what it used to be or you're saying it is no different? Speaker 2 Than what you know, I think it's kind of somewhere in in the middle. I think it's just, I just think it's the continuous history that we've lived through. And I think that history maybe not repeats directly, but the quote the Bard, it rhymes and and it's certainly, certainly doing that. You know, especially if you look it through the lens of disruption, you know, our industry is all about disrupting and we're really good at that. And we're so good at that, that now recently we're disrupting ourselves. But you know, if you embrace that kind of credo, that mantra, then you lean into it and just kind of look at it through the lens of especially in digital media publishers, how do we use that technology to evolve and not just evolve, but survive and not just survive but thrive. And I think that you're kind of seeing this continuum where digital media publishers are becoming like marketers and and the more that do that, the more successful they're going to be in this big shift. Speaker 1 That's amazing. Agentic AI and Revenue Per Session: Mula's Solution We're catching you at an interesting time. You were recently CTO of a public company and you just left and you've been an entrepreneur in residence and you're just coming out of stealth. And it is since a time where like publishing an ad tech, you don't see a lot of new companies. But the AIAI era has is bringing a lot more startups to the ad tech space. So here is our stage for you to introduce. Come out of stealth and introduce what you're doing with your company. Let's talk about what you're doing with Lola. Speaker 2 Wonderful. Yeah. So to your point, there is I'm proof there is investment that's coming into ad tech. This is a space that is, I think even more relevant now than it was before and the analogy that I kind of use in this era, and I think that that's the right, you know, kind of terminology that we've been using because this is the next evolution. The AILLM era is it's all about content and and the LLMS that have access to the most content are going to be providing the best user experience and there's going to be some things that they can't provide and nail. And this is one of the things that we learned very keenly under we had some great leadership over to Arena Group, Paul Edmondson kind of steer in the Chris Hunter and a lot of other folks in the product and tech side on my teams and editorial side, breaking news, that's something that the LLMS can't really fully nail. And that's something that you're going to continue to see. And Google is in a great, I believe Google's in a great position because right now Google makes up for 80%, 70 to 80%. It depends on which publisher you are of your traffic. If you're a traditional web publisher. And and that's been hit a little bit because they have to compete against the LLM's. It's natural, you know, I mean, they, they have new entrance into their space and they have to compete against them and provide users with a similar experience. So when you look at that, they're a little different though, because they can lean into those things that the LLMS don't do well. You know, like travel is a category that you know, the LLMS don't really do well because a human has to be in the loop of that breaking news. Human has to be in the loop of that. That's something that happens right now in the here. And you know, I think that the most successful publishers are building around that. But then also a retention. And that's what brought me to Moolah and that's one of the things that I was focused on at Arena Group. How do we get that one page view per visit to 2:00 to 3:00? And I think the existing companies that are out there that are doing just recommended content, that's what they're doing. They're following basically advertisers that are traditionally made for ads, advertisers and their specific goal is to get traffic to those pages. And publishers get, you know that. And it can be a little Faustian, quite frankly, because publishers don't understand the value of their of sessions. We have to get off of the page and we have to start thinking about the session. And so we kind of looked at it at Moola. And this was my vision when I was at Arena Group and I shared it with Offline Ventures. And Offline Ventures shared this vision as well. There's an area that they were working on which was e-commerce content. Like how can we make the most relevant e-commerce experience for a user when they come to a site very similar to the social media platforms like TikTok? Shop is the best thing to kind of think about it or Meta and get that dwell time up, get relevant content experiences and get people to immerse themselves in that based on the content of the page. Then we evolved it based on the user because not all content is talking about products on a page. So you need to understand the user and understand what products belong belong to that user. But then there's a leap you take from that and go, well, let's, if you focus on the God of revenue per session, which is really what publishers need to focus on, how do you get them to that next page and that next page, that next page and extend that session? It's not just about dwell time on a page and an RPM. It's another dimension and revenue per session. Is that so taking that same agentic LLM type brain just like the social media companies have and using that data and the LLM capability to to get that doom scrolling behavior on a digital web publisher and get people love scrolling. As long as the content is relevant and they will stay, they will dwell. And as they do that, you got a cargo ad that's reloading down below there and you're making moolah. You've got a wide sky programmatic on the right hand side and you're just refreshing and you're making moolah. You got an exco autoplay video or a JW autoplay video up top and it's running its ads and you're making more moolah. Beyond E-commerce: Mula's OS and Publisher Data Challenges So like our is not just about a widget. That's not what we are. We view ourselves as an agentic OS for digital media publishing. Speaker 1 And that, I mean that is a great start, but you're not anchoring yourself to commerce or bringing commerce experiences. You're saying, OK, if a user comes to this page, I'm going to create anything that is interesting that will help them stick longer on the page. It could be another article, it could be an e-commerce product, it could be something else that they're interested in as long as they're going to stick through on the page. Speaker 2 That's right. And we'll bring e-commerce to the table because that's something that we have solved using our agentic first approach and data modeling, again, much like the walled gardens do. And I learned a lot about this back in Myspace, 2 years before Facebook ads, there was my ads and I ran that platform. We understood that the density of data makes things predictive. And that's the power of that the walled gardens have. But you can replicate that on web, especially in the era of AI. And so it's your point, we look at ourselves as an OS because you're right, it's about content. It's not just about e-commerce. That's not the only God that we serve. We serve the God of revenue per session. And when you do that, you start making the right decisions because then you start thinking, well, if I extend in the session, session is naturally going to extend revenue, right? Because there's, we know this, there's ads and AD units on the page on that next page and on that next page, on that next page, get people scrolling and spending time relevant products. That's one because they get down on the bottom of the page. Let's use on three as an example, big publisher of ours. You're on a Wolverine page. Wolverines are relevant. They won the national championship a couple years ago. You know, rabid fans. Alabama would be 1. Georgia would be another. And then they get down the bottom and they start to see merch, merch that is relevant to them based on content page or who they are as a cohort. That's interesting. I'm going to keep going. This is the same behavior that you have on the social media sites, right? But then you see that next article that your cohort or the content on the page would like. And then you go into that and now you've taken again that one page view per visit to that RPM from you know where it was at 20 to 30, right? Speaker 1 And isn't this something like publishers and the product teams and the publishers, do they not think about this? How do they currently solve? Like what are like, how did you end up discovering this problem? Like was it something that you felt like was that was missing, they didn't have the tools or was it not a challenge? Was it not a problem that couldn't have been solved without the LLM and the AI world that we live with today? Speaker 2 Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I've been fortunate that I've been a part of big publishers that were, you know, a, a smaller subset of a larger digital media company or, you know, digital publishers that, you know, were media technology platforms like the Arena Group, you know, former being CBS. And, you know, we, we had technology, we had the right technology. We, you know, when we first got to CBS, we had our own ad server and order management system. There's probably things that you shouldn't be building. Those are things you should license, but you can build CTV. That's something that's interesting. You know, it's all about syndicating and distributing your content. Those are technologies that you should lean into. We do the same thing at the Arena Group. But the reality is, is that there's a big barrier for a lot of digital media publishers to build something like this that the walled gardens have, and that barrier are data lakes. Those are expensive and there are a handful of publishers that can afford those, and they absolutely should. You know, you see people that are in the subscriptions business and people that have of, you know, amazing audience products like your dot Dash Meritus or your Yahoos and you know, and they have that size totally makes sense and it's worth that investment. But you're talking about 500,000 to $1,000,000 out the door. Not a lot of publishers can do that. Now you're talking about data scientists that can create a concept of a user table. Publishers traditionally have been about two things, audience and they know how to get SEO traffic and monetization. Those are kind of the two legs of the stool and maybe some BI in between that understand stands those intersections, but not the user and the value of the user. That's what marketers have really nailed over the past couple decades in digital advertising. But that's the shift that has to happen on the publisher side because if there's less traffic coming in up here on the audience side, you have to mine the store when people come in and keep them going because there's a lot of great content and articles that your teams are writing that aren't even getting exposed to. So to your point earlier, it's like how can we use LLM limbs and an agentic first approach to get that discovery going so people can consume that once they come into the site? Interesting. Why Rev Share Works: Increasing Dwell Time and Page Views And do you plan to make MOLA platform in a way that like the data remains with the publisher and they can use it for other use cases especially like engagement data users or or is it going to be a cross domain data that you're going to use it for yourself? Speaker 2 Like, yeah, that's right. It's all about open, not about black box. And so we're we're working with publishers, data management platforms and even direct sales teams for some of the larger publishers, getting them an understanding of their audience, what their audience are buying, what their audiences are engaging in. That's very valuable to use with a direct advertiser, but it's also valuable from a segment perspective like how can we take this behavioral data that's immense amount of engagement that we're seeing and share that with the digital media publisher into the demand, their data management platforms rather. So they're creating segments off of that that they can monetize with the demand side platforms with their private marketplace teams. Speaker 1 That makes sense. Congratulations on the launch. And we're curious to know like how do you price or create value or how does it get commercialized for a publisher? Are they using this symbol to like a WordPress and paying his ass fees or is it working on a different ref share model similar to like to go out brain or like how are you thinking about this? Speaker 2 Yeah, it's really kind of similar to the latter. We found that publishers and I found that it's easier if you're kind of been more of a transactional mindset. You're incentivized to do that anyway to drive more revenue because the publisher makes more revenue, you make more revenue. SAS is hard for a publisher because it's below a different line. There are different groups that are involved in that. It's an immediate cost. So things are very hard to test. And really unless you're like core infrastructure like a cloud, you know, management platform or an ad serving platform or an analytics platform probably doesn't make sense, especially if revenue is kind of your main drive and use an AI to, you know, increase time and increase content consumption, which increases revenue. That's at its core. So we work on a Rev share capacity with publishers and and it's not just within the Moola widget. Like you know from our perspective, it's about capturing everything that's going on outside of that, right when you're going through if we're talking about dwell time somebody's spending, we're seeing 50% minimum time spent. In many cases, we're seeing over 100% increase in dwell and then 30% increases in in sessions. So revenue per session because they're going on to the next page. What can a publisher trade for that next page that's a new page view for them. So if I'm a publisher and I'm going to site and let's say that I have and I'm generating with Moolah an additional $10 per thousand on a pageview and I was generating $20 per four. So there's a Rev share on that first page that a user comes into based on the unit, but then the ads that are happening as a result of the person engaging in the unit, the reloads of the ads, we're able to use key value pairs to track that for publishers and show them that total RPM lift. OK, that's great. That's on that one page. But then the next session, if I get to a free page view and I'm now making $30 on that page view instead of $20 per page view, I'm kind of willing to give you the $5. And that's a fair trade all day long so that you increase the page views. Speaker 1 Six or seven years back, this is my story. I don't think you know this. We started working on a vertical video product. This is How I Met Josh actually, which was basically the same thesis is that you're already creating a lot of social content for your Instagram and you don't monetize that. You spend a lot of time resources creating that content. And if you can bring that content experience to your own and operate properties, you can double the time spent. And we actually built like an Instagram Reels kind of a player where you can basically scroll through. And this was back in like 2019-2020, like Stories was the format. It was what the same thesis that like if you can double the engagement time because everything traffic is on mobile, this is the default format like all the social platforms offer and you're already creating content for that. The biggest challenge was again, direct monetization inside that player was hard because there was no demand to plug in, which is I see like how you're not running on that as your core monetization here. The biggest challenge that we felt was publishers did not create infinite content like social platforms had infinite content on All they had to do was use AI to basically tailor that for every individual user. So you keep spending more and more time that level of content did not exist with the publisher. We had to go then go work with like influencers or content creators to bring that content into the ecosystem to actually improve all time. So we kind of like pivoted away from that business. Solving Video Monetization and Publisher Traffic Loss So I'm I'm very familiar with what he was talking about, but this is an interesting model because like it doesn't have to be video, it can be and. Speaker 2 I was just about to say, I don't want to interrupt you, Vijay, but like for video, that's 100% true, especially for the vertical variety. And look, we leaned into that when I was at Arena because it was right, because again, the God that we follow our revenue per session. And so when you follow that, you come on to products like that. But the thing that you realize very quickly is, first of all, inserting banners and buttons in that experience is not conducive. And you see the usage go way down because people don't want to be spammed when they go through that. The endemic add to your point is what they want to see. But our programmatic ecosystem doesn't carry that. And when we would have conversations with the brilliant people over The Trade Desk, like, you know, Will's like that's very interesting, but I'm not going to take our buying team and like redirect them off of the other strategic things that they're working on for The Trade Desk, like. Racing, CTV and the such to go get their client, go top their social media buying person on the shoulder and have them come over here when there's not a lot of supply because it's in that weird chicken and the egg kind of paradigm. So whereas I do think eventually in the future that can be monetized, I think that it's a slower build until you kind of solve for that demand equation. So in the interim, we're all focused on the content that they do have that's not been. Speaker 1 Seen, I think the one publisher that I've seen successfully do that is MLB, because they have the content, they have the gaming curse, they have like and they can create those and have those experiences and they're being able to sell sponsorship and direct it. I think that's the right way to law ties. Speaker 2 In that's the combination. I think that you're right. I think some like a Yahoo can do that very well too because they have a demand side platform. They also have a great, you know, in market direct team that can that can marry that to their own content that they own and kind of create that ecosystem. And, and then maybe it builds off of that over time. But I think that that's more of kind of like a 234 year kind of build and not like not the prescient moment that we're in now right now. I kind of think of it as as a bit of a transition, but a triage type transition where publishers have lost 3050% of their traffic. And like what arrow do I have in my quiver right now where I can make up for that lost traffic? And, and we feel that this is this is that. Speaker 1 That's amazing. Do you think this works for all kinds of publishers, like even news and like how are you? Because it's commerce based, isn't like vertical specific? Or do you think it's more generic and can be used anywhere? Speaker 2 You know, with the core engine of e-commerce, I mean, people buy and you see this with TikTok shop and social like, and, and gave me even Shopify like integrated for like real time, you know, one click purchasing. Like when you're evolving and developing and optimizing around that, like there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of offers for every single category. So yeah, it, it's across the board. And then there's defaults, you know, for other categories. And then don't forget about the audience cohorting capabilities that we bring to the table where it's not just about the content on the page. Like with social media, like it's not about the thing that you saw before, it kind of is because that's a, that's an event. Like that's a data point. I've always thought about data science as like a tree and they're branches on the tree. And the more branches you have on an individual user, the more predictive you can get with your recommendations, which means a more relevant experience is so you have that virtuous cycle. So yeah, that's the kind of way that we look at it. Speaker 1 That's awesome. Well, I think that's it's a great start. Agentic Automation: Where AI Delivers ROI for Publishers We'll get into the next segment, which is great with AI. You also spend a bunch of time with Jiffy, which is known for agentic automation, different verticals. What do you think is right for agentic automation in the publishing landscape? I know your product is doing a lot of these automation for this recommendation, but as a publisher, like if I'm looking into if I'm, if I'm a large media company and everything is getting automated and I want to use agents to automate. I have different parts of the business. Like I have content creation, I have ad OPS, I have campaign management inside ad OPS, I have personalization. What area or what where should I take AI to like as an executive of a large media company? Speaker 2 Yeah. These are excellent questions, Vijay. So let's put them into buckets. So let's talk operations, business operations, revenue, operations. To your point, Jiffy, that's what we were doing there. And I'm still involved with them on, on kind of the executive chair side. But that that's all about order to cash. So order comes in. How do we get that automated into this platform that's doing a lot of manual industry, a lot of manual order entry tasks? That's an area #1 #2 advanced analytics. Like how can you? We talked about the problem of publishers not being allowed real time revenue to talk to their audience and editorial data so that they can make more informed decisions. What's the most valuable audience that's coming to my pages and how can I extract that? Especially if you lose traffic, Like that's more important now more than ever. Like aren't your editorial team to understand what the most valuable audiences are and to get more of that traffic is the right strategy. And there are technologies out there that can do that and LLM capabilities can do that. If you're storing the data in a structured way, revenue, audience, editorial and having those things kind of orchestrated and come together using LLMS, content creation. And I know it's like a taboo thing. This is an area that I think it's more of a, a 5050 like more so in the human in the loop where, you know, the, the intellectual property for digital media publisher is the content. Like that's the thing that brings them the most traffic. And again, this is 2 pillars that we talked about earlier growth, typically the product and or the SEO teams. Sometimes they're in different groups, sometimes that mostly they're in the same group. That's what they're really good at. They know how to design their CMSS and structure their taxonomies in order to have CEO Google spiders understand that content and bring traffic to it. But then also monetization, but effectively having the editor side by side with the LLMS to surface and tie this back to business intelligence, right? What are the most valuable articles that I should write on from a traffic perspective, from a monetization perspective? And then even leaning into them to do some framework work so that they can create more content. But then that's manual user in the loop, you know, you hear human in the loop comes in where that's just a skeleton and then they fill it in with their, you know, wonderful brains and their IP, which again is content for digital media publisher. And so it's using the technology to scale the content opportunities versus using the technologies to automatically create it because that's not something that's good, you know, user experience. I think the human element is more important in that bucket that. Navigating SAS: When Publishers Should Build or Partner Makes sense. And do I, am I looking at this from like improving productivity standpoint or am I looking at it from like cost saving standpoint like and again, it can be deployed across all of these verticals, right And like you mentioned there's room for optimization across any of these verticals, but I'm not sure of like, OK, which one do I touch and where is the most ROI? A follow on question for that, like given you were the CTO of a media company, when do you decide whether am I building these technologies in house or do I partner with somebody because everything is moving so fast, right? So and as a publisher, how do you prioritize, OK, let me pick this and should I do this in house? Should I partner with somebody else? Speaker 2 Yeah, I tend to think you follow IP and wherever your intellectual property lies, those are things that you should innovate around. And if there's technology that's out there, I use the analogy earlier, building your own ad server because you can continue to play this game was like, well, we create content and we need ads to monetize that content. So we should probably build the ad server. No, no, that's, that's too far because #1 high tech engineers aren't going to work for you as a digital media publisher. They're going to go work at Meta, they're going to go work at Google, they're going to go work at TikTok, right? Because the best engineers out there are going to follow the equity opportunity, rightfully so, in places that are more right for innovation, right? So, so, so don't build things like that. Build things that are I think more bespoke and custom to if you've got a big direct sales team, you know, working on like rich media type ad executions and working with rich media vendors out there. And we talked about the content automation to scale the content production and we talked about business intelligence, you know, getting that fed into the users. I don't think that they need to build the business intelligence automation reporting platforms, but I think that they need to build and structure the right data so that those platforms can drink from that and surface those ideations than intelligence. So yeah, I think that there's a line where a publisher should probably not cross in terms of tech, and that's kind of where it's core to their business of what their identity is, and that's taking their content and getting it distributed for more eyeballs. So those are the things that you should innovate more towards the rest of the stuff, you know, leverage. That's what VCs and private equity firms are for, because they go out and they give dollars to startups like ours and we go out and get the best engineers because they want to bet on themselves. And they're pioneers for a reason. And they have the best ideas because they're equity driven. And. And that's a virtuous cycle in Silicon Valley, right? Has been for years, yeah. Speaker 1 And with the way you're framing it, there should be a thriving SAS ecosystem that services publishers, right? Based on what you're saying, hey, work only on your core IP and everything else, partner with companies. But you don't see that, you don't see a lot of SAS companies build for publishers. So where, where is the disconnect in terms of like, do they not want those capabilities? Do they not want to pay for those capabilities in like anything that's not core to you? If you're like going to be partnering with someone, there should be a thriving ecosystem of SAS company servicing media publishers, which doesn't exist. So yeah, your mind like is it like what do you, I mean you yourself said like publishers, it's hard on them for to pay SAS or your own products, right. So where do you think that disconnected? And if you were, I don't know if you were about if you're evaluating SAS products when you were at the Rio group or not, but like what was your decision making process in that case and how would you evaluate it? Do you have much? Speaker 2 Incremental cost and any publisher is going to go through a more rigorous inspection if there's a lot of costs associated with it. And, and that kind of magic number in a publisher is like north of $100,000 a year. And the more that you get above that number, there's more hands on that have to go through that and approve it. And if you're doing it the right way, you are doing POCSI think that SAS can work within a publisher if publishers were structured the right way to do it. So at Arena Group, we built a really good system where we didn't we didn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. If it was SAS, if things were very relevant to increasing revenue and again, the gods that we talked about serving the pillars of content or monetization test it. We created something called test desk that, you know, you kind of build things into the edge. You know, some people that are more advanced have stats sig and there are things within, you know, GAM and pre bid that enable you to have AB testing where you can test different iterations, get different ad IDs for different executions and get a pulse check and understand like did it increase my guide metric of revenue per session or secondarily, if you can't do revenue per session RPM, if you don't have that rigor bill, you're not going to be able to do the SAS game because it's incremental cost. Publisher doesn't know what the revenue opportunity is against that or they're just not even doing that. If organizations don't say, hey, this is going to cost us $200,000, but it's also going to bring us $500,000 to $1,000,000 in, and that's axiomatic, then that dog is going to hunt, as they say in the South. But if you don't have that muscle built, then that dog is not going to hunt. And so that, and I think a lot of publishers aren't, aren't built that way because there's a lot of torso and tail publishers that just don't have the capital to invest in that infrastructure and it's easier to make those decisions on revenue at runtime. And so I think that that's why the Rev share model has been embraced. Speaker 1 So it's in like what would you say for like utility price, like for example in BI tool or like an analytics real time analytic solution, which which you've been a part of. How do publishers justify that? Like it's probably like 5 grand a month or 10 grand a month. It sells has to be for a BI tool based on what you're using it for. Speaker 2 It's within that. It's, it's core to their business. So I look at ad serving through the same lens, Vijay. It's like it serves one of those pillars, it's growth, OK, that is we, the company that I had was spiny that touched both revenue and audience, but it's it's growth. And so OK, we're going to go with a Parsley or Chartbeat and that's a sass fee. But but it's hugely important for one of the biggest pillars of our business. So absolutely like full stop, it's just an axiomatic. It's an axiom like, you know, you have to have that. And to your point, it's like 5, maybe 10 grand Max, not even per month. It falls below that $100,000 threshold. And it's in that bucket of like, I have to have this tool in order for my editors to work, in order for my product team to understand, you know, the value of that traffic that's coming in and going and getting more of those things. ACM tools are in that kind of same category, a Google Search Console, ACM rush, you know, things like that. But yeah, everything that's kind of outside of that is really kind of falling in the monetization world. And if you're working in the monetization world, the easiest thing to do is Rep share because they can easily prove that from an RPM perspective and they can go, OK, this is additive, let's go. Speaker 1 That makes sense. Publishers and Curation: Taking an Active Role in Programmatic Let's I know we've talked about a whole hierarchy with regards to the publishing content and the workflow process. I want to go in a direction where I want to ask you about you talked about programmatic as a landscape, right? And we started in over the last decade, we've gone through ups and downs in terms of like the ecosystem itself. We're right now at a tipping point. There is significant amount of QPSA lot of waste that's happening, Bitstream bloked, which is all in the ecosystem and publishers are making less and less dollars, right. And as a solution to that or as an antidote to the Bitstream bloke came solution called sell side decisioning or curation. If you look into that solution, even in that solution, publishers are basically cut out because you're sending the bid request, somebody else is packaging the bid request sitting on top of the SSB. They don't have to work with you. Like unlike the ad network based, they don't need to directly talk to you is they can get the skill directly by sitting on the SSPS and they're basically curating in creating deals and essentially getting we don't know how much of the dollars actually flows to the publishers. What should a publisher do to participate in duration first and second? Do you think this is a trend that's gonna take off in the right direction given it? Speaker 2 Yeah, it's a great question, Vijay. I think it will. I think that's underneath the headline of ad networks. They're always gonna ad network the the middle person business is the oldest business in the world, one of the oldest businesses in the world, and it's going to continue. And they found an opportunity and an end. And you know, all of those dudes go to the same Star Wars bar, you know, and so you have to have technology and I think that there's some products out there that do that. I think Nicholas and team over Atomic have done that. They're one of the first ones that have done that. We worked with them on it. And then it's very sharp. You know, they work with the SSPS to understand using natural language processing and you know, using a bit of LLMS as well to understand what those campaigns are E CP/M S are versus your benchmark ecpms. And like, is this a good trade or a bad trade? At least just giving you surfacing it and giving you visibility into it. That's step one because it's here to stay. And so you need to understand like is it a creative, is it incremental to you know what's going on? And if it's not, you should block it or you should have a conversation with the in person, particularly if they're bringing in an advertiser that your private marketplace team is already bringing in and put guardrails around it. Or if you have the relationship directly with the advertiser go, we're going to block this because they're not adhering to our rate card and we are finding that they're taking 40 to 50% margin out of the working media. And those are the languages that you use with the demand inside the advertiser. And once they know that like they are, they are abhorrent to it, right? Because they want most of their working media dollars to go to the right place in the stack because that can get guarantees better performance, right? You're going to get better click through rates, better click through rates, get better conversion rates. Better conversion rates means more people buy stuff, which is what the CMO is on that for. So I think that that's the right way to kind of look at this world of curation. And that's the way that we're looking at it at the Arena Group. Speaker 1 Interesting. And would publishers be then collaborating with curators? And what value add can publishers bring to curators in this case? Right. Because like, it kind of feels like the curator doesn't need the publisher. Yes, of course you're going to anyway sell the big requests for the exchange. I'm sitting on top of the exchange. What do I need from the publisher that I don't have today? Is this is this an opportunity for a publisher to have a seat at the table, become a curator themselves? Or do they have first party data that they can use or enable the curators with so that they can create campaigns? Speaker 2 It's all about scale. I think that it's kind of like when the SSP start doing their own marketplaces and having advertisers buy directly in them. It's like, how can I get myself in more packages that are going to increase my yield and my CPM? And in some of those cases, should I make sure that the SSP understands like what kind of animal I am? And from a audience perspective, like making sure that they have as much information on my audience as possible? And some of that can be in the form of first party data to do that. I think that's a similar partnership. I think that if a curator has scale and they're working with an advertiser that you're not working with directly or an advertiser that you're working with directly, but you don't have as much scale. And you can get more scale if you do strategic partnerships with them, IE some type of first party data joiner collaboration, 100% like that's going to increase your overall ECPM because you're going to get more of a more of the budget for that individual campaign. But it starts with the tools to at least even understand that and have like a really good, you know, private marketplace team tied to a yield kind of function to make sure that's that's the team that we constructed. And I think you know who those folks are over at the arena group, right? That like, you know, right hand knows and it's almost kind of like like a general manager type person like we had Kong and she's working with Brendan Cleary and he's going out. He's got all the right relationships. But at the core, there's a yield tool, like where the atomic thing comes in, where it's giving them transparency in terms of what those campaigns are so that there can be that collaboration. But I, I think that you also nailed it. Like if you have scale, you should be your own curator, especially if you're in certain endemic categories that are relevant to you. Like, you know, we had sports and we had personal finance and we had, you know, women's interest, lifestyle. Those are things that, if you have enough scale on, you should absolutely be your own curator. Speaker 1 Interesting. And I mean, I kind of feel like you don't want curation to be, I mean, the way you were saying it is, hey, you were optimizing for the open exchange before figuring out which partner to send what requests to. Now do the same thing to make sure that your inventory gets ended up in packages, right? So that's basically what you're saying, But it still feels like a passive role a more I feel like curation could be more of an active role in a way that. Speaker 2 If you if you become your own curator and you have stuff like, you know, to again, use relevant names for my team and background. Like that's why Steph Mazzamaro was managing that business for us because she understood the first party audience game like and got that hard. And, and knowing what the core infrastructure needs to be servicing the right data segments and then enabling, you know, somebody on the private marketplace side to take those to market, to talk to those individual buyers and merchandise that like, that's a very important muscle in that game. And you almost kind of become like your own retail media network. You know, it's like it's retail media slash curation. You know, I, I think that they all kind of belong together and go back to moolah. Like that's why we want to put those segments into their data management platforms to empower that because they absolutely should use that data to do it both on their site, but then off of their site just like the other curators are doing. The True Value of SSPs and Unique Demand Yeah, I think it's, it's an emerging space like you mentioned, publishers don't even know like if the mentor request was curator or not. And based on like public data, it seems like 81% of all requests had a deal ID attached in the recent past. Which means I, I we've been talking to pre bid to see if we can if we can know which requests were created and which requests were not. Speaker 2 But that would be a great, that would be a great tool. Scott Messer turned us on to that at the Arena Group. And like, we were shocked, Like when he came back and gave us that data point, we're like, whoa, like we don't even know what we're. And then that led us to tools like Adamic at the time because they were the first ones to market with something. Something is better than nothing, right? Yeah. Speaker 1 For sure. Speaker 2 Yeah. Speaker 1 It's, it's, I feel like it's going to stay too, like you mentioned. And I feel like it's a it's, I don't think if it's a level playing field, but at least it's an opportunity to reframe the conversation because we can't solve the bitstream bloat the genies out-of-the-box. And I don't think it's going back. Speaker 2 So no, but you got you. But you guys are agents of the publisher you're serving, serving them in a couple of variety of products, right? Like #1 you're helping them with pricing and yield, right? It will that touches curation number two, you're helping them with understanding the value of certain users, IE impressions and you know, which demand partners monetize those the best because of QPS. To your point below, that's a problem and it's going to continue to be a problem if if you're able to bring those two things together and get insight, you know, at runtime of these 80I, you know, percent IDs, absolutely, you know, that's in your mission. Like surface that and get that to as many publishers as you can so that they make sure that they don't have that yield. You know, again, one of your other products that yield corrosion, you know, you can't have that because it takes too much, you know, too big of a bite out of the apple. And this is what we learned. We increased CPM 75% during my time when I was Arena Group. And one of those things was working with companies like yourself, but also cutting out the middle person. We're going to come and sell yourself to, to, to surface data to go. We probably shouldn't be working with that intermediary because more isn't more. And what we're learning is in a variable based pricing ecosystem where there's a lot of resellers that aren't plugged in directly into the DSP, holy heck, they're taking 30, maybe 50%. I mean, you know, this, you live this everyday a chunk out of the apple. So it's that old equation of like a dollar, you know, goes in $0.40 comes out. It's even less than that sometimes. Yeah, it's cutting that stuff out increases your yield. Speaker 1 That makes sense if I were to throw a core ball or pre bid management companies the new SSPS because why are exchanges calling themselves SSPS? Because they don't serve the publisher, they don't service the buyer. They're kind of self-serving at this point. Is the pre bid layer which is already conducting the auction? Is the pre bid or upper management companies in the USS VS who are working on behalf of the publishers? Speaker 2 So I go back, I harken back to my days at Open XI general manage the publisher business. So, you know, product business development, good market. And I would say that back in those days, it was all about getting access to the DSPS, like who had the most DSP connections, because that would give you the highest yield. But it's, and then having rigorous standards in place where like you're not on boarding crap. Like, and we've seen some of this recently with the analytic stuff, you know, I mean, you can't believe some of the stuff that's getting monetized and God bless those guys for shining flashlights on some of that stuff because the SSPS, to your point, are curating that or not. Like they're, they don't have safeguards in place where they're or even checking that. So it's your point, like, you know, what are some of them really doing? But there are some that really are, you know, doing that. They're scanning tags on publisher pages. They're making sure that, you know, their ads ads aren't being monetized on adult content and you know, things that they shouldn't be monetized on, you know, Uzbekistan traffic and this and that. Like those that are providing that value, 100% they're providing value. Those that aren't directly integrated into demand side platforms. And by the way, The Trade Desk stopped integrating in with SSPS probably 7 years ago and that's why we have so many resellers because they can't get integrated directly with the DSPS. But if there's going to be more open path stuff like, you know, Yahoo's direct system backstage, you know, type integrations, if a lot of those DSPS are going to go straight into the wrapper, then the SSP and then the SSPS like the big SSPS like Magnite out there. Do you have a big demand team and they are bringing unique demand. I think that that's the other question that you have to ask of the SSP SP and Dex is doing the same thing and they're bringing great executives over there as well and, and Pomatic like if they're if if they are actually doing their own curation and bringing value to you, then absolutely it's relevant. But it it kind of almost goes back to the ad network days where, you know, they're all kind of doing their own demand and they're doing their own supply and you know this and that. So I think that you have to kind of ask that question like what kind of an animal are you? Are you just like reselling or do you actually have like a demand team and audience data and working thoughtfully with your publishers? Because that should be the true definition of a supply side. Adapting to AI Search: Publishers as Marketers for Retention Platform that makes sense let's take a hard turn we have talked about programmatic and monetization mostly but publishers are currently facing a looming challenge with regards to traffic itself with the rise of AI in search traffic going away. Let's talk about over the last decade we just had paid social or Facebook organic social, which was basically one of the main sources of traffic and there was an era of publishers building on top of it and then you had Google search, which has been there forever, which is also was a more reliable source compared to the Facebook algorithms. The publishers are used to traffic from these two sources and now the Google search traffic is taking a hit, right? And publishers are now have to exercise a muscle to figure out discovery or sure, they might have been using those muscles in the past, but now it's more and more hard to find discovery opportunities and not comes to retention. So like you mentioned, if my traffic is going down, I would want more engagement and more attention on the existing users. Is that something that publishers are built for? Do they have those capabilities? Is that something that they can pivot into with the rights and AI search? Speaker 2 Think yes, I think that CRM data science people that understand how users are classified, catalogued, IE into some type of a data lake or maybe it's a data management platform. I don't think that you know, unless you're a certain size publisher, you probably don't need that investment. But but to at least understand who your audience is, you're starting to talk about things and using marketing speak. When we talk about the publisher needing become a marketer, that's what we're talking about. If if your traffic starts to get cut here, how are you going to replace that traffic? So what are the arrows in your quiver? All right, so establish the CRM type team. Those are people with traditional marketing backgrounds who understand audiences that are coming to your site. We talked about some of this earlier. What are some of the more valuable audiences? And they're working with people on the monetization team to capture those audiences, to merchandise those audiences because they're ad supported businesses, but effectively go out and find those audiences, buy them. I think that because of MFA Media, buying to publisher sites has gotten a bad name. And that name begins with an A and it's called arbitrage, but it doesn't have to be. I think that you can ultimately, if you retain a lot of people and the guy that you serve is RPS and you have a deeper RPS, you don't have to have 1087 ads on the page. You know, you can have a good type of experiences like we're bringing with Mula of like relevant content. Like don't even think about it as like an ad. It's a piece of content that's relevant to a certain individual. As long as you're doing that and as long as you're increasing the session, then the value of that session is more and you can go out and buy traffic to that and you can do it affordably. I built these businesses at CBSCBS big premium brand. We wouldn't do it more than 20% of our traffic, but we had really good content and we would get that out on the socials and we would buy against it and we do the calculation in real time. That's ultimately dirty little secret house finding was born. So like, as long as you got that muscle built, AB newsletters, when people come in, like you talk about retention, capture people's information, build a relationship with them. If you've got like a CRM type discipline and you're learning more about your audiences, that's what places like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times Business Insider have been doing so well for so long is customer journey, right? And then capturing their information and then having communications with them afterwards or work with company Zeta Global. This is obviously their core business, right? Folks like live Intent. Those businesses are going to only increase in scale because the smart publishers are going to think more like marketers and they're going to be capturing more information. And then you look at your phone and you go, well, what is this thing when I swipe all the way over on my, you know, phone that says Apple News Plus. And Apple News Plus is really the thing. It's like a premium publisher that you want to invest in because we did this testing and regularly Apple News doesn't monetize very well. So like you want to talk about digital pennies for digital pennies, right? It's more like pesos, like you're not going to make money off of it. You have to lean into the Apple News Plus. Like that's the thing that you want. You want that subscription package and you want to be included in that bundle so that you can get a higher payout on that. And then you look at things like push notifications, again, that's a retentive vehicle that becomes more important. Everybody should be working with push notifications companies like Pushly, etcetera. Like that's just table. And by the way, when these traffic patterns shifted, our Pusley traffic went from like 10% of our total traffic to north of like double, triple, right? Like it becomes more important because now you're sending breaking news alerts out to people through their phones, on their browsers, etcetera. And they opted into this. It's not that you're spamming them or anything like that. So those are kind of and distribution networks like Yahoo has like huge direct traffic, like Yahoo is going to continue to have direct traffic and they're going to continue on a very MSN, like a very successful distribution network. Lean into that. So it's not that you're losing a certain percentage of that 70 to 80% of traffic that's coming in from SEO. If you think like a marketer, you start to think about, well, where else can I find my audience to bring them in at scale? Speaker 1 That makes sense. I mean, like most of it also comes down to like, OK, I need them to come to my website. So and unlike an ecommerce product where I'm coming there to buy something, you're going to have to have something of value that requires me to come to your site. And actually, yeah, that is the most important thing is that. Speaker 2 Yeah, product ideation, you're right. That's an important thing. Like we were in a arena, we would surface things that we had again from our IP, which is like content creation. But how can you create like engaging products off that community type stuff to to enable like, you know, more engagement and deeper sessions, quizzes, you know, are great for that. A polling and stuff like that are great for that. So yeah, creativity. But again, creativity is a component of being a marketer, right? Speaker 1 That makes sense. Yeah. I mean, this is the bigger question is do they do all publishers, how are they going to make this pivot and are they going to be capable of navigating? Speaker 2 This at this there's a lot of marketers out there really good ones that have been impacted by this era of AI happened to those people get some of those people on your team and they can sit in places like product and editorial, right, because a lot of them are copywriters. A lot of them are idea people. A lot of them are marketers. Marketers tell stories, right? And so you have to, and so do digital media publishers. So I think it's a perfect marriage I. Speaker 1 Agree. Quick Takes on Ad Tech, Mula's Vision, and Industry Leaders All right, let's go to the lightning round. This segment is all about hot takes, rapid fire questions, and your quick takes. Which publisher do you admire? Who's executing at the highest levels today? Speaker 2 Think some of the bigger publishers. Yahoo is the first one that comes to mind and I I'm biased because I worked with Glanzone for many decades and I think that he's got a good team over there. They're like right product minded, Matt Sanchez, Gabriel DeWitt, like a lot of really. So they're making smart acquisitions, understanding user journeying, like they're investing in that the marketer because the publisher becoming more like the marketer using product and technology. I think folks like dot Dash Meredith too, you know, obviously with a lot of the ad products they brought in, they they have a good notion or really strong notion of who their audience audiences are. Those are like kind of the two biggest I think that jump off the page. Speaker 1 That's perfect. I mean, dot Dash Meredith would have been my first Yahoo. I don't see them as a publisher. They're more of a technology company now. Speaker 2 Technology company, sure. So by default, pure pureplay publisher dot dash Meredith for sure. Speaker 1 I agree. What other ideas and opportunities that topped the list before you settled with Mullah? I'm pretty sure you considered other opportunities before you moved to build Mullah. Speaker 2 Yeah, I think, I think so for me and when I was looking to leave, I, I was looking at companies that were solving the intersection of user data, working with large language models. So a gentic in the AI space has to be relevant, you know kind of to that space and things that kind of embrace more of my marketer background because I I did work on the marketer side. I have been a CMOI started off as an e-mail marketer and got into product by way of creating e-mail products back in the day. And so that's where I got an understanding of database marketing and CRMS and all of that, that really kind of touches and touches data. You know, in Myspace, we kind of discovered the density of data and machine learning, which was AI before AI, you know, back in 2008, nine 10 and build interesting ad products. So that's been like the lens that I looked through like whenever I look at kind of the next thing, you know, So for me companies, I still work. Is it like Zeta Global? I think is an interesting company e-mail. I think we talked about this earlier. Anything that touches customer relationship management is interesting to me. This was something that really kind of resonated because I had met some of the folks that worked at the offline Ventures and studio family before I left Arena and I had this concept. I used to call it cognitive brain inside Arena group. People got tired of hearing that, but it was, but it was, you know, short of, of wearing a sandwich board. So we were talking about AI coming of like, well, it's pretty clear that we have to do a better job of retention and we need to invest in that. And we got to go from one page view per visit. They do more than that. But like, I'm just using as an example, one page view per visit to two to three. How do we do that? And so when I worked with the team and offline, they got it and, and they have their own venture, their, their own VC. And so with their LP's, you know, they created the studio that would carve off money and put it towards concepts and ideas that they incubated, kind of like AY combinator. And they've had over 150 ideas over the past three years since their infancy and only four have made it out. This is 1. And and you know, the team like Dave Moran and and Britt Moran, like they come from Facebook and they come from Google, but they understand large language models and machine learning. You know, folks at the search engines and the social media companies have been doing it. Like I said, like this is where I discovered it at Myspace. I've been doing it for over a decades. Those were some of the first places. So for me, the fact that they were willing to put capital against a shared vision was really like the game changer. And I wanted to take this vision out to publishers because we were aligned in the fact that it's timely. Like they need this technology now, like more than ever because of those obstacles that we talked about in terms of like investment and resources that they don't have, right? Speaker 1 That's great. I mean, I was curious more from the angle that like, did you come through other attic areas or channels or platforms? But it seems like you're scratching your own edge based on your like immediate experience of like a direct problem that you were facing. Yeah. Speaker 2 I didn't want to look into too many different areas. It was, it was really kind of, you know, folks that I have been talking to and, and DNA that I've had and just leaning into that. And it's really, like you said, it's kind of your comfort space, you know what I mean? Speaker 1 Yeah, I think that's the best way to do it, because you can't. You can't go looking for problems if you already. Speaker 2 Were facing or, or or money. No, no pun intended with like moolah, right but like my father taught me at like a very young age, you know, being kind of like a blue collar background like don't do anything for the money. Like do it for the passion first and foremost. And if you're good enough at it, like money. And if you're in an area that has a lot of money, a sector that has a lot of money, money will follow, you know, at the end of the day. And so, yeah, I just, I just, I'm keeping on keeping on, man, you know, just focusing on the passion, yeah. Speaker 1 That's great. Let's take a different direction here. You know a Google Ad Manager as being the default ad server and obviously Adex being the reason there is a DOJ versus Google and changes remedies proposed is to separate gamut addicts. I want to ask what what do you think happens if that happens and will it be actually good for publishers? Are there good enough ad servers in the market and will it actually proliferate more tech companies servicing publishers or will there be more opportunity for ad tech companies servicing publishers? Speaker 2 Do you think so? I think that optionality is always a good thing. Look, we grew up in the capitalist society and one of the main tenants is user choice, consumer choice. And the more choice that there is out there, the better it is for the consumer. So more competition from my perspective is better. I grew up loving Google, but also working at companies where Google was the ire of our company. Like Open XI actually sold an ad server and market, you know, because I was a glutton for punishment, but you know, it was an alternative. Like strategically it kind of made sense. So I do think that we're at an inflection point at a time where it is relevant again. And and I think that, you know, there can be some efficiencies potentially in AD serving, although I don't know, I mean, Google was very good at packaging that with the ad exchange to discount the ad server. So I'm not going to raise a flag and say publishers are going to save so much more money in their ad serving bill. I don't think that that's going to be the case. I would look for things where you work with an alternative technology because it enables you to do smarter things from like a gives you optionality and so you can do smarter things like a. Yield management perspective maybe and increase your revenue versus, you know, a big dominant, you know, person like Google taking more of that revenue because they have that stickiness kind of with those two core products gammon addicts. So, yeah, I think as long as you kind of look it through that lens of I don't think it's going to be a big cost saver, but look at it through the lens of like optionality and, you know, using that optionality to increase your yield and not having, you know, your hands kind of cuffed of like the way that you have to drive yield kind of within their ecosystem. I think that that's the win. Speaker 1 Makes sense. Last question on the lightning round, if you could host a Reddit AMA with anyone in nap tech, who would it be and why? Speaker 2 It's a great question. I'm going to go with Ari Paparo first. I think that obviously it's the soup du jour, but I've always respected the way that his mind worked. And I'd probably go with Brian O'kelly or Jeff Green, you know, kind of been around there. Jeff, cuz he's a friend of mine. I've always enjoyed talking to him, like over the years. Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, it's more anonymous so you can ask questions. So yeah, these are your friends, so you can. Speaker 2 Exactly. Speaker 1 Thank you so much for joining us, Station. This was a great conversation. We really appreciate your time and the clarity that you brought to this conversation. Speaker 2 Now I appreciate the platform VJ and the thoughtful conversation and the insight. You guys are always at the tip of the spear.