SODP Dispatch - 11 September 2025

A Publisher’s Engagement Playbook!

🚀 We’ve launched the first industry research report in partnership with Glide Publishing Platform!

Join global publishing leaders, product owners, data strategists, and tech innovators to benchmark how your team personalizes, engages, and grows using first-party data.

🔍️ What’s in it for you?

• Benchmark CDP Engagement, Adoption & Performance

• Discover Emerging Personalization Trends

• Access Actionable Best Practices

• Learn From Real-World Challenges & Wins

Whether you're using behavioural signals, AI-powered tools, or topic-based tagging, your insights matter. Help shape a report that reflects what’s really driving results across the industry.

👉️ Take the survey now! We need 300 respondents, and the survey closes soon. Be the first to receive exclusive insights.

What is AI Slop? A Technologist Explains This New and Largely Unwelcome Form of Online Content

By Adam Nemeroff

You’ve probably encountered images in your social media feeds that look like a cross between photographs and computer-generated graphics. Some are fantastical – think Shrimp Jesus – and some are believable at a quick glance – remember the little girl clutching a puppy in a boat during a flood?

These are examples of AI slop, low- to mid-quality content – video, images, audio, text or a mix – created with AI tools, often with little regard for accuracy. It’s fast, easy and inexpensive to make this content. AI slop producers typically place it on social media to exploit the economics of attention on the internet, displacing higher-quality material that could be more helpful.

AI slop has been increasing over the past few years. As the term “slop” indicates, that’s generally not good for people using the internet.

AI slop’s many forms

The Guardian published an analysis in July 2025 examining how AI slop is taking over YouTube’s fastest-growing channels. The journalists found that nine out of the top 100 fastest-growing channels feature AI-generated content like zombie football and cat soap operas.

Listening to Spotify? Be skeptical of that new band, The Velvet Sundown, that appeared on the streaming service with a creative backstory and derivative tracks. It’s AI-generated.

In many cases, people submit AI slop that’s just good enough to attract and keep users’ attention, allowing the submitter to profit from platforms that monetize streaming and view-based content..

🍽️ SODP Dinner series

Following our recent dinner event in New York, we are pleased to announce the upcoming editions of our Audience & Revenue Innovation Series, with events scheduled to take place in London and Dubai. This exclusive dinner series will bring together senior media publishing leaders and executives to explore the rewritten global and local playbooks for audience monetization and growth. Seats are limited, register now for the events. Register for London dinner ▸ Register for Dubai dinner ▸

🧭Elements of Audience Engagement

Elements of Audience Engagement is a mindset, an introduction, and a toolkit. It is grounded in the belief that in a digital information ecosystem, prioritising audiences, their needs and habits, is journalism’s most resilient foundation for growth and impact, enabling newsrooms not just to survive but to adapt with purpose. See more ▸

By Vahe Arabian

📢 From publishers to creators: where ad budgets are really going

Advertising budgets are not gone; they’ve simply shifted to creators who act like publishers.

For years, businesses relied on big ad networks and media agencies to distribute their budgets. But spending patterns are changing. Increasingly, we see brands allocating funds directly to individuals who can create content that resonates, drives attention, and fosters trust with their audiences.

This doesn’t mean advertising is shrinking; it’s just moving closer to the people who can capture attention with relevance and authenticity. The challenge for publishers and businesses is clear: how do you act like a content creator to access these dollars?

Marketers are under pressure to prove ROI. Instead of broad placements, they’re betting on creators who deliver measurable engagement in niche communities. Research shows that influencer marketing spending continues to rise, with global estimates in the tens of billions annually (Statista, 2025).

That money isn’t disappearing; it’s just flowing through different pipes.

What content creators are doing right

Creators earn this share of the budget because they:

• Publish consistently: They show up regularly with content that’s fresh, timely, and aligned with audience interests.

• Focus on niche authority: They don’t try to be everything to everyone; they build depth in one area.

• Foster community: Engagement is two-way, not broadcast-only.

• Show personality and trust: Their audience knows who is behind the content, which builds credibility.

How can publishers adapt:

If you want to attract these budgets, act more like a creator:

1. Prioritise storytelling and expertise: Showcase the human side of your brand alongside expertise in your subject matter.

2. Invest in consistent output: Treat your publishing cadence with the same discipline as a professional content creator.

3. Build identifiable voices: Authors, editors, and contributors should be visible, not hidden behind a logo.

4. Measure and prove value: Track engagement, conversions, and attention metrics, not just impressions.

Advertising money hasn’t disappeared. It has moved closer to creators who can demonstrate relevance, authenticity, and impact. For businesses and publishers, the opportunity is to stop thinking like an ad slot and start thinking like a trusted creator who can tell stories, build audiences, and drive results

The web has a new system for making AI companies pay up | The Verge

A new licensing standard aims to let web publishers set the terms of how AI system developers use their work. On Wednesday, major brands like Reddit, Yahoo, Medium, Quora, and People Inc. announced support for Really Simple Licensing (RSL), an open content licensing standard that enables publishers to outline how bots should pay to scrape their sites for AI training data. They’re hoping the collective action gives them leverage to get AI companies on board. Read more ▸

The real Google anti-trust case to watch | Jason Kint

Correct Judge Mehta didn't order Google breakup last week but late Friday night we saw DOJ is full speed ahead in its other remedies trial in 16 days and posted its PFJ (Proposed Final Remedies) now 60+ pages of brilliant detail. Let me walk you through key terms. Read more ▸

Upfronts: YouTube comes for podcasts, locks in Ad Council’s Effies, cites Analytic Partners for ROI supremacy, resurrects 60-second unskippable ads and touts 'behavioural economics' AI ad placements | Mi3

YouTube set a high bar for the upfront season, lining up marketing science and effectiveness big guns to back its claims for primacy and stepping up its offensive to claim the biggest screen in the living room - and held up a mirror to the marketing industry that dazzled with reflective hot topic buttons. As well as TV, YouTube’s also coming for podcasts – and it's ramping up integration with Gemini AI to create dynamic ad placements to hit the behavioural economics principle of the peak end rule as well as connect brands with influencers and creators. Read more ▸

Meta adds new features to Community Notes fact checks, including alerts for corrected posts | TechCrunch

Meta is introducing a few new features for its crowdsourced fact-checking program, Community Notes, launched in the U.S. earlier this year. Now users will be notified when they’ve interacted with a post on Facebook, Instagram, or Threads that receives a Community Note. Plus, anyone can now request a note or rate a note if it’s been helpful to them. The company says these features are considered “tests” at present. Read more ▸

Bias in Search: Visibility, Perception, and Control | Duane Forrester Decodes

Bias in search isn’t always negative. It’s easy to frame it as something sinister, but bias shows up for structural reasons, behavioral reasons, and sometimes as a deliberate choice. The real task for marketers and communicators is recognizing when it’s happening, and what that means for visibility, perception, and control. Two recent pieces got me thinking more deeply about this. The first is Dejan’s exploration of Selection Rate (SR), which highlights how AI systems favor certain sources over others. Read more ▸

The Secret Search Engine Powering a Major AI (Hint: It’s Not Google or Bing) | Search Engine World

Brave Search has carved out a place in the secondary search market as a privacy-first engine with its own independent index. Unlike engines that use Bing or Google APIs, Brave runs its own crawler to build and maintain a proprietary index of billions of pages. This makes it a genuine search alternative that SEOs should monitor. Brave has also become notable as a search and data source for Anthropic Claude. That partnership alone signals Brave’s growing importance in the search ecosystem. Read more ▸