publisher-monetization
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Ezoic and the price of a visit
A publisher can sell more ads and still earn less. Ezoic built its business around that awkward little fact - then had to learn a version of it itself.
Mediavine turned the ad problem into the business.
It built advertising tools to pay for its own websites. Then the neighbors came knocking. Today, Mediavine helps more than 20,000 publishers turn attention into income.
Monumetric makes the small publisher count
A website can have loyal readers and still be a lousy business. Monumetric handles the advertising machinery - starting at 10,000 monthly pageviews - so independent publishers can get paid for the audience they have built.
Aditude and the price of waiting
The auction lasts milliseconds. The fix can take a week. Aditude is building a publisher business around closing that expensive gap.
Raptive discovered the money behind the recipe
Raptive sold its own publications to help independent publishers earn more. Now the company behind thousands of websites is trying to make the same bargain work in the age of AI.
Genesis Media put a price on six seconds of attention
Genesis Media tried to make video advertising answer to the reader. Its journey from an attention-funded paywall to six-second ads reveals both the promise and the financial limits of a clever idea.
RebelMouse gave the archive a brain. Then taught it some manners.
A publishing platform found a useful job for AI inside a newsroom’s back catalogue. Its more interesting lesson came when the clever search started getting things wrong.
Clickky put a price on attention. Then came the bill.
The Ukrainian ad platform turned mobile traffic into a business for advertisers and publishers. Its history asks a less comfortable question: what, exactly, have you bought when you buy a user?
Doceree wants pharma ads to follow the prescription
A physician-founded advertising company built its network where doctors read and work. Now Doceree is chasing the harder question: did the message help a prescription become a treatment?
Affinity Global finds money in the overlooked click
A browser shortcut. A misspelled address. A broken shopping link. Affinity Global has built a business around the small moments that advertising tends to overlook.
OpenX bets better advertising starts before the bid
The ad exchange moved its machinery into Google’s cloud, then moved more decisions toward the publisher. Its wager: the route to an audience can matter as much as the audience itself.
The Search Engine That Followed the Money
Technorati once measured who mattered in the blogosphere. Then it discovered that the more durable business was helping those same publishers sell what they owned: attention.
The Internet Priced Everything Except the Page
Zzazz wants every article, video and dataset to carry a live price. The strange part is not the number - it is the market the company hopes will form around it.
The Video Call That Became a 14-Billion-Request Ad Machine
When streaming costs outran ooVoo's advertising income, two operators kept the useful part: the machinery for finding, checking and selling attention. Krush Media is what happened next.
Permutive Wants Publishers to Sell What They Know
Publishers know their readers. Too often, somebody else gets paid for that knowledge. Permutive is building the software to change the transaction - and now wants AI agents to handle more of the work.
Yieldmo Wants to Buy the Moment Your Thumb Slows Down
The ad tech company built its business around the gestures between seeing an ad and clicking it. Its next bet: pair the right creative with the right page before an advertiser spends a dollar.
Skimlinks found the business inside the links
The social shopping idea failed. The technology built to fund it became Skimlinks, a business that turns publishers’ product links into commissions - and keeps a share for itself.
LoopMe wants to know if the ad changed your mind
The London adtech company turns consumer surveys into instructions for the next ad buy. With Chartboost in its pocket, it is taking that feedback loop deeper into mobile games, apps and connected TV.
Admixer wants you to run your own ad business
The company that began by selling ads on Ukrainian websites now sells the machinery behind the market. Its pitch to agencies and publishers: keep more control over the audience, the auction and the money.
FairPlay Built the Betting Business Hiding Behind the Scoreboard
Oddschecker spent 25 years teaching bettors to shop for a better price. Now its parent is turning that habit, and the data trail behind it, into infrastructure for the rest of sports media.
Shachar Orren Left the Newsroom - Then Built the Business Meant to Keep Newsrooms in Business
After nearly a decade editing other people’s stories, Shachar Orren joined a six-person startup and learned to sell. Twelve years, one rebrand and several pivots later, she is still working on the same stubborn question: how can publishers turn attention into a business without making the audience pay the price?
Etology Built a Tollbooth for the Internet's Hard-to-Reach Traffic
Etology has spent years matching niche publishers with performance marketers. Its wager is simple: in digital advertising, the right traffic matters more than the most traffic.
TripleLift Wants to Fix the Internet's Most Ignored Product: The Ad
The ad-tech company built its first business by making ads fit the page. Now it is trying to coordinate creative, data, inventory and measurement before the impression ever reaches a screen.
Teads
Teads wants to make the fragmented open internet buyable like one coherent medium. After combining Outbrain's performance engine with Teads' premium video and creative stack, its wager is that the web outside the walled gardens can compete screen by screen - including the biggest one in the house.
Nexxen
Nexxen is betting that the best way through advertising's maze of screens, signals and middlemen is to own the road from audience discovery to the final impression. Its challenge is turning that unusually complete stack into a simpler choice for buyers and publishers.
Decide
Decide is a St. Louis-based advertising technology company - the rebrand of LockerDome, founded in 2008 - that runs a machine-learning platform called the Decision Marketplace. Rather than relying on third-party cookies or intrusive identity data, Decide lets multiple ML models compete in real time to select and price ad impressions, powering a two-sided marketplace that connects publishers and brands across the open web. Its widgets and content-recommendation units have reached over 100 million monthly users, positioning the company as a cookieless, performance-focused alternative to legacy programmatic ad stacks.
EX.CO
EX.CO is a machine learning-driven video technology platform that helps publishers and media owners run, manage, and monetize video across web, mobile, CTV, and DOOH. Founded in 2012 as the interactive-content company Playbuzz and rebranded to EX.CO in 2019, the New York-based, Disney-backed company now offers an online video platform (OVP), a CMS, player technology, and an LLM-powered recommendation and yield engine used by publishers including Advance Local, Hearst Newspapers, The Arena Group, and Ziff Davis.
Tom Pachys
Tom Pachys is the co-founder and CEO of EX.CO, a Disney-backed video technology and monetization platform used by publishers including Hearst, CBSi, Time, Nasdaq, and VICE. He started building websites at 12, served in an elite Israeli intelligence-technology unit, was an early leader at SundaySky, and co-founded the machine-learning startup Whimado before co-founding Playbuzz in 2012, which he rebranded into EX.CO in 2019. He now leads roughly 160 people worldwide, betting that AI and supply-path optimization can rescue the economics of online video for the open web.
Picnic
Picnic is a London-born ad-tech company building user-first advertising for the open web. It packages social-media-style ad formats - Stories, swipe-to-act, emoji reactions - and delivers them on premium publisher inventory, aiming to make ads people actually engage with rather than ignore. Founded in 2017 by Matthew Goldhill, Picnic pairs its creative formats with PIQ, an inventory-quality platform, and ships every campaign carbon neutral, claiming roughly 50% lower emissions than the industry standard.
PubMatic
PubMatic is an independent, publicly traded ad tech company that runs a sell-side platform connecting digital publishers with advertisers through real-time programmatic auctions. Built on its own cloud infrastructure rather than rented servers, PubMatic processes trillions of ad impressions and is pushing into connected TV, commerce media, and agentic AI tools that automate ad buying and selling.