AI is rewriting the attention economy. Perplexity’s “citations, not clicks” payouts and Cloudflare’s pay-per-crawl model mark a new phase where platforms set the rules of visibility. Unless brands and agencies demand clarity, control, and real behavioral signals, performance will be optimized to interfaces, not outcomes.
Recently, Cloudflare took the unusual step of publicly calling out Perplexity AI for scraping publisher content without permission. And they didn’t hold back – accusing the company of disguising its crawler, bypassing robots.txt rules, and consuming massive bandwidth without attribution or consent. Cue the familiar debate: who owns online content? Should AI assistants be allowed to “learn” from everything on the web? Is scraping theft – or fair use?
Today’s media teams aren’t just asked to drive results; they’re asked to defend them. In a market where ad budgets are under the microscope and every dollar must prove its worth, clarity and efficiency win. It’s no longer about spending more — it’s about spending smarter. The brands that can surface waste, double down on what works, and adapt in real time will be the ones that thrive in this new media economy.
You can have the best ad in the world – high-performing creative, long time in view, shown to an engaged user. But if it’s squeezed between seven other ads on a cluttered page? It’s not going to land. That’s the part we don’t talk about enough. The environment. The layout. The density. The visual noise around the impression. Let’s talk about two under appreciated KPIs that shape that environment.
Let’s start with what everyone agrees on: ad quality matters. It matters for advertisers trying to get results. It matters for publishers looking to maintain credibility. And it matters for the end users – yes, the ones we’re all supposedly optimizing for – who just want to read the content they came for without being bombarded, interrupted, or ignored.
The latest courtroom drama surrounding Google has sparked debates about the future of Chrome and its role in digital advertising. But is selling Chrome really the solution? The core issue lies deeper, in the broken data model driving the digital advertising industry. It’s time for AdTech to move beyond surveillance-driven targeting and focus on privacy-preserving, data-driven innovations like AI-powered predictions and first-party data strategies.
Sell-side curation might just be the hottest topic in AdTech at the moment. See why publishers need to step up now and turn a hot topic into a win, and make sure the middlemen don’t walk away with all the benefits.
We’re naturally drawn to bad news but when it comes to ad dollars, it’s not always so straightforward. Read this article to explore why bad news gets clicks but doesn’t always pay and what really impacts engagement and ad revenue.
News Corp is accusing Perplexity of using its articles to fuel search results without permission in a move that crosses copyright red lines. In other words, News Corp is saying Perplexity is taking advantage of news content without contributing anything back. This type of accusation isn’t the first and probably not the last in the gray area of AI.
Since 2021, open programmatic ad spending has barely grown by 3% while the walled gardens – think Google and Amazon – have surged ahead with 10% growth. This gap raises questions about the future of the open internet. But, against this data, there are signs this landscape may become more balanced.
Today, according to recent stats, 31.5% of internet users globally use ad blockers at least occasionally. While most traffic now comes from mobile devices, desktop still dominates ad blocking. This, of course, comes with considerable cost implications. Just this year, the popular use of ad blockers is estimated to cost publishers $54 billion in lost advertising revenue. But the situation isn’t as bad as it once was. Ad blocking is no longer a massive problem for publishers.
The days of vague attention metrics are officially over. The Media Rating Council (MRC) and The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) are finally teaming up to standardize attention measurement, marking a significant milestone in the publishing industry. At this stage accreditation guidelines are expected to roll out in early 2025, this is huge news for publishers, and it’s happening just in time.
