SODP Dispatch - 10 September 2026

How Facebook’s News Feed introduced the age of the algorithm 20 years ago

 By Asher Kessler

It is two decades since Facebook introduced the News Feed – letting loose a world in which algorithms would shape ever more of our lives.

In 2006, Facebook was facing something of a crisis. Its internal data suggested that for the first time since its launch two years earlier (as TheFacebook), the company had stopped growing. People weren’t joining, and existing users weren’t spending more time on the site.

The solution co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and colleagues came up with, the News Feed, meant individual users’ homepages would be automatically updated with information tailored to them – in particular, new posts their Facebook friends had added.

Up to then, users had to actively check their friends’ profiles to see what they were up to. Now, this information would automatically be sent to your homepage. With it, a new world of algorithmic interaction was born.

It might seem quaint now, but for many Facebook users at the time, these changes felt like a violation of their privacy and trust. If you were to change your relationship status from “in a relationship” to “it’s complicated”, for example, this could now be broadcast to all of your online friends.

The News Feed caused the first major protest against Facebook. Tens of thousands of users joined a group calling for the return of the original system. A spontaneous protest emerged outside Facebook’s office in the city of Palo Alto, California. For the first time, the company felt it had to hire security guards.

💬 We want to hear from you: Twenty years on from the News Feed, what's the one algorithmic shift you think publishers still haven't adapted to? Hit reply and tell us — we read every response, and yours might shape a future issue.

📚 Search Everywhere Optimization Playbook for Publishers — New Cohort Opens September 29

Publishers used to have one front door: the Google result. Now there are four - Google Search and Top Stories, Google Discover, AI answers, and social search - and readers move between them in a single day. This live course teaches one method for winning across all four: become the source of choice on your topics, and prove it with a number every month.

Led by Vahe Arabian, founder of SODP & SODP Media, the course runs on a simple loop: Baseline, Diagnose, Prioritize, Fix, Launch, Verify, and Systemize. We'll apply this live to a student's own site each session, using DiscoverAudit, the free tool SODP built for this purpose.

What you'll walk away with

• A brand-of-choice scorecard tracking Search, Discover, AI win rate, and social presence across your topics

• A diagnostic framework for every content gap: not covered, not extractable, not fresh, not eligible, or not framed well

• A content system built from your own top performers, with headline formulas and editor-ready briefs

• A 72-hour launch sequence across all four surfaces

• A no-code tool you build yourself in week 4, which is your own live scorecard or Discover velocity alert

Who it's for: Owners and founders of independent publishers, audience/growth/SEO leads, and editorial operations leads who own the Search, Discover, and Google News results.

Date: Sep 29 – Oct 22, 2026

Enroll here ▸

📊 SODP Publisher Revenue Dinner in Miami next week

We are hosting a private dinner in Miami for senior revenue leaders across news, gaming, newsletter, specialist, and brand publishing. This dinner is for publishing professionals who are actively driving revenue strategy and want a candid, peer-level conversation on how to win the biggest commercial quarter of the year. If you are a Chief Revenue Officer, CEO, Programmatic Head, or Partnerships Director making decisions around yield, inventory, first-party data, and Q4 growth, this evening is designed for you.

Date: Wednesday, September 16, 2026
Time: 6:30 PM
Venue: Coral Room, Rusty Pelican Miami Restaurant, 3201 Rickenbacker Cwy, Key Biscayne, FL 33149, United States

What you will walk away with

• Practical yield, personalisation, and first-party data moves that are lifting revenue per visit right now

• A candid read on how your peers are pricing, packaging, and positioning inventory for the Q4 surge

• Insight into which new formats — video, newsletters, and creator partnerships — are actually paying in 2026

• An attendee-only summary of the evening's key insights and growth playbooks shared around the table

The dinner is high-trust, collaborative, and entirely off-the-record under Chatham House Rule. No panels, no pitches, no slides — just one focused evening on how to make every session, impression, and first-party signal work at full value in publishing's most important quarter.

Seats are strictly limited to 15 attendees.

A big thank you to Ezoic for co-hosting this evening with us.

Apply for your seat here ▸

🎯 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

🤖 The Ad Tech Do-Over: Why Publishers Are Betting on Agents, Not More Hops

Agents aren't a demo anymore; publishers have them running real jobs. Today it's RFP interpretation, planning, pacing, and curation. Next up: direct pipes, fewer hops, and a smaller take-rate.

The current programmatic stack evolved into exactly what it promised to avoid: opacity, inefficiency, and value extraction. Publishers watched as 50 percent cuts became standard, with ads hopping through SSPs, DSPs, verification layers, and data brokers before reaching audiences. Each hop added latency, reduced transparency, and stripped revenue. The complexity made attribution nearly impossible and debugging a nightmare. Now, with agentic AI, publishers have a chance at a do-over.

The promise is enticing: agentic AI-driven media trading could wipe out many of the problems caused by its programmatic predecessor — namely, ad tech middlemen taking cuts as high as 50 percent. Instead of having ads pass through countless vendors, agents would effectively cut the line, so more money reaches the publisher, and results are easier to see.

The end goal: a seller and a buyer agent coordinating directly, with ideally no coordination agent in the middle. What publishers don't want: the recreation of a multi-step programmatic ad tech stack.

"Programmatic is really due for an upgrade." — Revenue exec at a major publisher

Agentic-driven media buying could be it. Around 50 percent of Permutive's 150+ publisher clients are using agents in day-to-day operations like RFP interpretations and campaign planning. The company's agents are already live across the direct buying cycle — from audience management to optimization and reporting.

Here come the caveats

As one publishing exec put it, the first seller agents are like interns: eager, useful, but needing supervision. No one hands sales to an intern for a reason — they underprice, grab the quick win, and skip guardrails. Early buying agents will behave the same way.

"Everything that any junior revenue sales person in the entire media ecosystem has ever done wrong is going to happen at scale with agents. You need to walk into this with your eyes open, knowing it's going to fail."

Another reason to cut intermediaries: fewer hops mean faster fixes when things break.

"If we have multiple hops, it's all going to go horribly wrong, because trying to coordinate across multiple companies is hard, as well as multiple companies using black box agents – it's going to be a mess." — Same exec

Regardless of adoption protocols like AdCP, agent adoption will only happen at scale if outcomes drive solid results for buyers and drive up yields for publishers.

"Transactional volume is not there today, and it won't move there unless our [publisher ad] products outperform Facebook and Google. That's where publishers need to focus – on building high-quality ad products that deliver outcomes."

🎯 Practical steps for publishers

1. Start small, one-to-one — Pilot direct buyer-seller agent partnerships with willing agencies. Avoid recreating the multi-hop programmatic stack.

2. Set guardrails early — Treat early agents like supervised interns: establish pricing floors, approval workflows, and quality controls before scaling.

3. Focus on product quality — Agent infrastructure won't matter if your ad products don't outperform walled gardens. Prioritize outcomes over adoption speed.

4. Prepare for failure at scale — Early mistakes are inevitable. Build monitoring systems and fast-fix protocols for when agents underprice or miss guardrails.

What news CEOs are investing in — and what they are killing | INMA

I’m just back from spending a week with 40 CEOs in Vail at INMA’s CEO Roundtable. We had some invigorating conversations and brisk debates over various topics. It was a closed-door session held under the Chatham House Rule to ensure people could be as candid as possible. What do CEOs value in the news business — and what is considered dispensable now? We asked them. Almost all said they want to automate breaking news and commodity news and their archives.

Read more ▸

Two years ago, Meta killed CrowdTangle. Can a new AI tool fill the void? | NiemanLab

In 2024, Meta shuttered CrowdTangle, a tool used to track how content spread across Facebook and Instagram. The portal was an essential tool for journalists, fact-checkers, and researchers, who used it for more than a decade to monitor viral content — and the spread of misinformation. CrowdTangle’s end came slowly. Meta disinvested in the tool over years by cutting funding, disbanding teams, and restricting users.

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Google gives AdSense publishers 30 days to opt out of fallback banners | PPC

Google is adding a switch to AdSense accounts that lets its own consent tool put a cookie banner on your site whenever no valid consent signal is detected in Europe, and it will create banners for any new site you add. The switch turns itself on for most publishers, and it starts doing real work on or after October 9, 2026. If you would rather keep manual control of your consent banners, the toggle sits in Privacy and messaging under European regulations settings and can be turned off before or after that date.

Read more ▸

Active Media promises local news — in print and in every mailbox | Editor & Publisher

At a time when many news media businesses and newsrooms are striving for technological innovation — AI, social media, vertical video and audio — there’s a local news publisher in Oregon that’s bucking those trends. Their model: Local publications, produced and printed monthly, distributed free of charge, enthusiastically supported by local advertisers. And they’re not just sustaining, they’re growing.

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We rebuilt SEOquake, Semrush’s free SEO Chrome extension | SemRush

On September 9, 2026, Semrush released a rebuilt version of SEOquake, the free Chrome extension for running quick page-level SEO checks without leaving your browser. If you already have SEOquake installed, you don't need to reinstall it. The rebuild arrives as a Chrome Web Store update. I’ve had SEOquake in my browser for most of my career. For a long stretch, I kept it installed mostly out of habit. I’d open it to check a title tag, skip past metrics I no longer relied on, and close it again. Some metrics had become outdated, while others stopped returning results at all.

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Brands Are Tracking AI Visibility, But Are They Measuring The Right Things? | SEJ

AI visibility tools now make it easier for you to see how often your brand shows up across ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, and other AI search surfaces. While the scores they provide can be helpful for guiding marketers, it’s not always clear what actions to take based on them. The demand for these tracking tools is steadily increasing. Ahrefs reports a 184% rise in searches for “AI search tracking” and a 175% rise for “AI rank tracking” over the past year in the U.S., based on monthly data from their Keywords Explorer

Read more ▸