SODP Dispatch - 1 October 2026

Sponsored

Kadam Launches Smart Mediation to Help Publishers Earn More From Existing Traffic

 By Kadam

Publishers working with several ad networks often face the same problem: the CPM shown in a dashboard does not necessarily tell them which source is actually making the most money.

A network may look stronger on paper while monetizing only part of the traffic it receives. Another may show a lower CPM but accept a much larger share. Comparing the two by dashboard rates alone can therefore lead to the wrong traffic allocation.

Kadam Smart Mediation, a new monetization tool for publishers, is built around a different approach. Instead of looking only at reported CPMs, it compares how much revenue each connected source actually generates and automatically adjusts traffic distribution based on real performance.

The goal is straightforward: help publishers increase revenue from the traffic they already have, without replacing their existing ad networks or paying a mediation fee.

Kadam is also backing the launch with a revenue guarantee: publishers can get at least 10% more revenue in 14 days compared with their current mediation setup if they connect by October 5. The guarantee includes a Kadam top-up to deliver the full +10% result.

💬 We want to hear from you: If a network's dashboard CPM and your actual payout have ever told two different stories, have you tried to quantify the gap? Hit reply and tell us; we read every response, and yours might shape a future issue.

Trust Is the Business Model: What 15 Years of Her Canberra Teaches Publishers About Thriving in the Age of AI

 By Samuel Fatola

Trust in news is becoming challenging to earn. Global trust in news fell to 37% in 2026, a big drop from 43% in 2019 and the lowest level recorded by the Reuters Institute since the Trust in News Index started in 2015, with especially sharp declines in 29 of 48 markets studied. But despite the overall collapse, local news brands consistently rank higher in trust than national brands, with the same year-on-year downward trend.

Few publishers exemplify that journey better than Her Canberra. Amanda Whitley launched Her Canberra in her spare room in January 2011 without institutional help or investment. But in the last 15 years, she’s learned, evolved and shaped the publication along the way, without a roadmap. Her Canberra now ranks among the city’s leading media titles, with a readership of 150,000 every month and more than 130,000 followers across social channels. Whitley has been named to UN Women’s 100 Years, 100 Great Women list and ACT Woman of the Year, and runs her own new media business, but for now, Her Canberra is the media business she continues to operate as a founder.

What makes her story more noteworthy is that Her Canberra grew at the moment the old playbook of most publishers began to unravel: revenue from programmatic display advertising disappeared, AI content started drowning out every other topic, and the platform economy started rewarding scale at the expense of specificity. Her Canberra didn’t out-scale that; she doubled down on the alternative.

In conversation with State of Digital Publishing, Amanda of Her Canberra explains how AI could make hyperlocal content more valuable and why the “local media is dying” narrative has always misread the actual problem.

💬 We want to hear from you: Is your publication chasing scale, or protecting the relevance that makes your audience valuable in the first place? Hit reply and tell us; we read every response, and yours might shape a future issue.

🎙️ Future of the Web 2026 Webinar

WordPress VIP is hosting the Future of the Web 2026 webinar with Fueled, and we would love to invite you to join.

📅 Date: October 8
🕙 Time: 10 am EDT

Jodi Cerretani, CMO at WordPress VIP, and Phil Crumm, Managing Partner of Content Solutions at Fueled, are walking through new research on brand visibility and consumer trust in the age of AI.

One number that stood out: 61% of people surveyed can't name a single brand using AI well.

👉 Save a spot ▸

🎯 LiveRamp × OpenAI: Measure Your ChatGPT Ad Performance

If you're running or planning ads on ChatGPT, you can now close the measurement gap. LiveRamp's Conversions API (CAPI) Hub connects directly to ChatGPT ad campaigns via secure server-to-server data connections, meaning you get reliable conversion tracking without depending on browser-based signals that often break or go missing.

In practice, this means you can:

• See which ChatGPT campaigns are actually driving conversions — not just clicks

• Optimize spend in real time based on accurate performance data

• Justify and grow your ChatGPT ad budget with measurement data you can trust

As consumer journeys shift toward AI-powered platforms, this gives marketers the infrastructure to keep up, connecting data, measuring impact, and proving ROI on one of the fastest-growing ad surfaces in the world.

Read more ▸

By Vahe Arabian

🧱 Build, buy or own: four tests for your 2027 stack

Your CMS isn't outdated because of the year it launched. It's outdated because nobody has questioned it since.

Most publishers don't have a build-vs-buy strategy. They have a build-vs-buy habit. Look at what's running right now: a CMS chosen before AI crawlers were reading your archive, an ad stack run in-house because it always has been, a paywall contract that auto-renewed again this year, and an AI licensing enquiry with nobody assigned to answer it. Each made sense when it landed. Very few have been re-tested since.

With 2027 budgets being set now, this is the best window in years to re-test them. The options on every side have widened.

What's changed

Building got cheaper, but owning didn't. What once took a team 18 months, one capable engineer and an API can now stand up in a sprint. That's real, and it gives every publisher new leverage. The catch is that AI shortened the build, not the life of the system. The build is the down payment. Maintenance, security patches, integrations breaking on someone else's release schedule, and the one engineer who understands how it all fits together are the mortgage. Most build-vs-buy spreadsheets price the first and forget the second.

Buying got more modular. Five years ago, buying often meant a suite: take the whole platform or nothing. Now most capabilities can be bought as a component and connected through APIs. You no longer have to choose between owning everything and renting everything.

Owning got more valuable. AI platforms, retailers and agents want access to publisher archives, audience data, inventory and brand permission. For the first time, assets that sat on the balance sheet as cost centres have outside buyers. The publishers who set terms early get to set the rate.

Why the usual comparison misleads

The standard analysis puts a licence fee next to a build estimate and picks the smaller number. It misses three things: the people cost of running what you build, the speed at which your commercial team can change things, and what it costs to leave. Those three usually decide whether a system was the right call, and none of them appear on a quote.

Four tests that sort it faster

Differentiation. Would a reader or advertiser notice if a competitor ran the exact same system? If not, it's a commodity. Buy it, and put your engineers somewhere readers can feel the difference.

Speed to change. How many offers, ad placements or reader journeys can your commercial team change this afternoon without raising a dev ticket? If the answer is none, you don't own that layer in any practical sense, whoever wrote the code. Ownership is the ability to act, not the source code.

Exit. If you left the vendor tomorrow, would your data, reader IDs, subscriber records and content model come with you in a usable shape? The contract isn't the lock-in. The data model is. Ask for export rights and schema documentation before you sign, not at renewal.

Asset value. Is your archive structured, tagged and rights-cleared well enough that someone could license it? Do you know which pieces you hold full rights to, which carry freelancer or agency restrictions, and which include syndicated content you can't resell? Owning content and owning a licensable asset are different things. The gap between them is metadata.

The line runs through systems, not between them

Very few systems land cleanly in one column. The more useful pattern is hybrid:

• CMS: buy the core platform, build the editorial tooling that matches how your newsroom actually works.

• Ad stack: buy the plumbing, own your first-party data and the yield decisions made on it.

• Paywall: buy the infrastructure, own the offer logic, pricing and experiments.

• Data: own the reader ID and consent layer outright. Everything else connects to it.

• Audience: own the direct relationships — accounts, newsletters, apps — even if the tools that deliver them are rented.

Buy the platform, build the thin layer that makes you different, and own the data and relationship underneath. That's where most well-run stacks end up.

Making "own" pay

Owning an asset and being paid for it are two separate steps. The second one needs work most publishers haven't budgeted for:

• Rights metadata on every piece, so you can say what's licensable without a legal review each time.

• A clean content structure, so a buyer can take the archive by topic, date or format rather than as one dump.

• Consented first-party data, so audience insight can be packaged without creating risk.

• Machine-readable terms, so automated readers know what they can take and on what basis.

None of this is glamorous. It's also what turns an archive from a cost of storage into a line of revenue.

Giving someone ownership of the question

Someone owns the migration. Someone owns the contract. Nobody owns whether last year's decision still holds. Three habits fix that:

• Put every contract renewal on one calendar, with a review 90 days before each notice date. A credible build option, even a rough one, is the best leverage you can bring to a renewal.

• Pair the person who signs with the person who builds for every review. Decisions move faster when the budget holder and the system owner are in the same conversation.

• Re-open a decision when something changes, not only when a contract ends: a new capability becomes cheap to build, a vendor's roadmap drifts from yours, or the one person who maintains a system moves on.

A one-page exercise for this week

List five systems: CMS, data, paywall, ad stack, audience. For each one, run the four tests and write down which column it belongs in today: build, buy or own. Then circle any system where today's answer differs from how it's currently run.

Start with the systems nobody deliberately chose — the ones that came with a hire, an acquisition or a contract that auto-renewed. That's usually where the quickest wins are.

I'm collecting answers on this. Which test would your stack fail first, and who in your business owns the question? Hit reply and tell me. I'll share what comes back, anonymised, in a future issue.

Why European news media leaders are betting on brand again | INMA

Near the end of the first conference day at INMA’s Media Innovation Week in Madrid, the European Board asked the room where it would put its entire budget in 2027. Brand came out on top, chosen by 39% of respondents. Then Eimear Moran, group marketing director at The Irish Times Group, asked for a show of hands from those who actually plan to invest in brand next year. One hand went up. That gap between belief and budget ran through the whole week. Across two study tour days and three conference days, publishers kept arriving at the same conclusion from different directions: When content is abundant and traffic can’t be trusted, the brand is what’s left.

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Students suggest solutions for declining media literacy and diminished trust in news | Editor & Publisher

When high schoolers experience news and information through social media influencers and not through a habit of viewing or reading “traditional media,” how do they tackle a subject as complex as media literacy? That was the challenge that the Language Arts department at Northglenn High School, in the northern suburbs of Denver, attempted to take on as a STEM project. Northglenn High encourages Problem-Based Learning, where students work in teams to come up with solutions to real-world problems.

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Wikipedia, Podcasts & Reddit Now Drive AI Citations, Ask Your PR Team How They Did It | SEJ

The channels quietly feeding ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode right now are not the ones most SEOs spend their budget on. Wikipedia sits at the top of nearly every AI citation study published this year. Podcast transcripts are turning into permanent training data that outlives the interview by years. Reddit threads are showing up inside Google AI Overviews by the millions. PR professionals have been building real expertise in all three areas for a long time, mostly on their own side of the building, and AI search is now forcing SEOs to catch up fast.

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YouBot Is Bigger Than You Think: Who Uses You.com Search? | Search Engine World

YouBot may look like another AI crawler jamming up your logs. Dig into where You.com’s search infrastructure is actually available, and the footprint gets much bigger. I ran across YouBot while looking through crawler traffic and initially had the same reaction I suspect a lot of SEOs would have: “Who the heck is YouBot, and do I really care?“ At first glance, YouBot is the web crawler operated by You.com, one of the companies that entered the AI search race early. Cloudflare currently lists YouBot as a verified crawler operated directly by You.com and categorizes it as a search bot.

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LinkedIn tests advanced creator discovery to power brand campaigns | Social Media Today

LinkedIn is developing more options to help B2B marketers find relevant creators to work with, in order to tap into the value of creator credibility to boost their promotions and solidify decision-maker interest. And with 63% of B2B buyers now relying on creators for research and insights early in their buying process, per LinkedIn, finding the right creator could be a valuable consideration for B2B outreach. To help, LinkedIn is testing a new Creator Discovery element within its Creator Marketplace platform, which will provide marketers with more search filters to home in on the right creators for their campaigns.

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The LLM positioning lag: What it is and how to avoid it | Semrush

Repositioning your business helps you stay relevant as markets shift. For example, maybe you're a consultant who used to specialize in one service and have since expanded into a broader practice. Or maybe you're a company that started out serving small businesses and have since moved upmarket to enterprise. Either way, repositioning takes time and costs money. So once you've done it, you need people to actually know about it. But here's the catch: More people now use LLMs to learn about products, and services and if a chatbot repeats your old positioning, prospects will leave with the wrong idea of what you do and who you serve.

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