The Programmatic Power Shift: Challenges and Opportunities for Publishers in 2025

A Q&A with Andrew Mole, CEO & Co-Founder, pubX

Publisher ad revenue is under pressure as privacy regs tighten, third-party cookies disappear, and convoluted supply chains drain profits. Meanwhile, advertisers hold the advantage, armed with AI-driven tools that optimise every dollar they spend. The result? A programmatic ecosystem that is stacked against publishers.

That’s why the rise of pubtech matters. Built for publishers, AI and automation tools are shifting the balance—helping them take back control, unlock new revenue, and make smarter, data-driven decisions. In short, pubtech ensures no money is left on the table.

I sat down with Andrew Mole, CEO & Co-Founder of pubX, to discuss how pubtech can rebalance the revenue equation between advertisers and publishers.

Andrew Mole, CEO & Co-Founder, pubX

What do you think are the key advertising/programmatic challenges digital publishers are having to navigate in 2025?

Overall, publishers are struggling to maintain revenues, as advertisers lose confidence in their ability to target consumers due to the evolution of privacy regulations, as well as uncertainty around the continuing value and utility of third-party cookies.

Additionally, margins are still being shaved off by opaque and convoluted supply chains. Within these murky structures, various intermediaries scrape publisher data without permission and add bloated tags to websites, slowing them down and impacting the user experience.

At the root of this is a lack of vendor innovation on the supply side. Publishers simply don't have effective tools that can help them get to grips with their own data and as a result, they are struggling to improve their processes and optimise programmatic revenue.

Do you think advertisers still have an advantage over publishers when it comes to the programmatic ecosystem?

Advertisers have a huge advantage over publishers in the programmatic ecosystem. Having founded and operated a demand side platform (DSP) for many years, I've seen first-hand the level of sophistication that goes into buy-side modelling. Compared to this, the tools that publishers have to manage auctions and set prices are rudimentary and processes mostly manual; it's a completely lopsided situation. The real-time bidding market has been designed to favour advertisers.

The key reason for this is that the advertisers tend to have more financial resources at their disposal; innovation gathers on that side of the value chain as it is closer to the money.

You have spoken about the need for ‘pubtech’ as opposed to ‘adtech’ to help publishers deal with these challenges. Can you expand on how these differ?

Adtech is designed to help advertisers buy ads, whereas pubtech is designed to help publishers sell them. With so much innovation and investment in the adtech part of this equation – and very little on the publisher side – it's no wonder that the situation is so uneven. In most negotiations, you wouldn't allow just one side to set the terms and speak for both parties. But in digital advertising, this is exactly what's been happening.

Pubtech is required to help redress the balance between advertisers and publishers. One example of how this can be done is in setting floor prices for the many programmatic auctions that take place every day. Setting the price too low would lead publishers to lose revenue; too high and they won't achieve their target fill rate. Doing this manually is complex and time-consuming, and existing tools such as Google's Unified Pricing Rules are opaque and don't allow publishers to see whether they have achieved the best results, nor do they allow publishers to capture anywhere near the granularity required by a meaningful flooring strategy. They are also deeply manual, and a great example of the kind of tooling publishers are forced to make do with, whilst advertisers have almost unlimited resources in automation and machine learning.

Using a pubtech tool that utilises machine learning to assess multiple data points in real time means publishers can set the right price floor for each auction individually, increasing efficiency and optimising ad revenues.

While pubtech is pro-publisher, it's not anti-advertiser. It is simply a way of equipping sellers with equal technology to buyers to help close the gap that exists and make the market more efficient.

With the growing scrutiny over the big platforms, do you see advertisers investing more in the open web? What are the barriers to this? And what are the advantages?

Advertisers looking for certainty in the face of signal loss may have been tempted to shift their budgets away from the open web towards walled gardens like Google, Meta and Amazon. We would hope that many advertisers would respond to issues such as the removal of fact-checking on Facebook by reducing their investments there, but that's by no means guaranteed.

In terms of the open web, the increasingly common trend of audience and inventory curation means that investment is slimming down. Advertisers don't want to waste their budgets on MFA (made for advertising) websites, they want to connect with audiences in premium inventory. This is positive for publishers that have invested in their product and grown their audiences, but they still face the challenge of ensuring they get appropriate returns for their inventory.

What benefits can AI bring to publishers? Should they fear it or embrace it?

There is an understandable amount of trepidation about AI-generated content flooding the web and making advertising revenue harder to come by, as well as the threat to jobs posed by the increasing sophistication of generative AI and Large Language Models. But that's only part of the consideration.

In many cases, AI is an inevitability, and will change how processes are carried out and how departments such as finance operate. There is no way that publisher monetisation won't be disrupted by AI, so publishers don't really have any choice other than to embrace it – and the benefits it can bring in terms of optimising revenue and increasing efficiency will soon be apparent.

I would recommend that publishers identify the areas that will benefit from AI and those that won't. Embrace it, learn how to use it to streamline operations and extract the maximum value from your data as quickly as possible, then focus your creative resources on the areas that work best when humans are involved.

Looking ahead to the rest of 2025, what developments do you see in the publisher/pubtech space?

My hope is that many routine, data-based tasks will increasingly be handled by AI, allowing publishers to be more efficient and make more money. I also believe that many publishers will embark on strategic reviews in the coming month to really understand where exactly they sit in the value chain.

Thank you.