SODP Dispatch - 14 May 2026

Instagram can now read all users’ private messages. Will this make kids safer or just boost ad targeting?

By Joel Scanlan

As of May 8 end-to-end encryption is no longer available on direct messages on Instagram.

Meta, in announcing the policy reversal, said it had done so because few people used the feature. But this has raised questions about its impact on user privacy and whether it will improve child safety on the platform.

Instagram has long been a focal point for discussion about online safety – whether in relation to body image concerns, cyberbullying or sexual extortion. This policy change by Meta directly affects how safety and moderation are implemented in private messages.

This is important considering research has found that perpetrators first contacted roughly 23% of Australian sexual extortion victims on Instagram, the second most frequent method of contact, behind Snapchat (at 50%).

What is end-to-end encryption?

End-to-end encryption is a way of scrambling a message so only the sender’s and recipient’s devices can read it. The platform carrying the message, in this case Instagram, can’t access it.

This same technology is present by default on WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, and (since late 2023) Facebook Messenger.

Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg first promised to bring end-to-end encryption across Meta’s messaging products back in 2019, under the slogan “the future is private”.

Instagram tested encrypted direct messages in 2021. It rolled them out as an opt-in feature in 2023.

📊 SODP San Francisco Study Tour 2026 – Publisher Ad Revenue Leaders

We're bringing together 8–12 senior publisher ad revenue leaders in San Francisco for a private, two-day programme on what actually drives signal and revenue in publishing today.

Hosted in collaboration with Ezoic, the programme takes place across partner offices in the city, a closed-door, operator-led experience built around one question: what is actually driving signal and revenue in publishing today, and how are publishers monetising first-party data in the AI era?

This is not a conference. No panels, no presentations, no vendor pitches, just candid peer exchange across working sessions, roundtables, and a private dinner under Chatham House Rules.

Topics on the table: audience signal vs noise, AI-driven discovery, commerce media monetisation, first-party data strategies, and infrastructure as a revenue driver.

Date: June 15 & 16, 2026

The speaker line-up includes:

• Nealesh Patel, Chief Revenue Officer at Crunchbase, on scaling publisher revenue from $10M to $100M+ and AI-era GTM strategy

• Joe Hyrkin, Former CEO of Issuu (Now a renowned CEO coach and tech investor), on revenue strategies, platform shifts, and what actually drove growth

• Amanda Hesser, Co-Founder & Chairman of Food52, on the economics of content, community, and commerce at scale

The programme also includes a Bridge-to-Bridge Bay Cruise, a private dinner at Taksim, and more.

Seats are getting filled. It’s an experience you don’t want to miss!

Request your invitation here ▸

🎯 Google Discover Content Audit

Most publishers are guessing why their content doesn't appear in Google Discover. They're optimizing blindly without understanding the actual pipeline their articles need to pass through. This free audit tool from State of Digital Publishing tackles that gap by mapping your content against the 6-stage Google Discover pipeline: ingestion and entity extraction, OG tag configuration, content classification (evergreen vs breaking), quality signals and E-E-A-T assessment, predicted click-through rate modeling, and user topic matching. It shows you exactly where your content is failing to qualify, whether it's poor image optimization, missing entity signals, clickbait patterns being flagged, or weak topical authority, the same diagnostic framework that determines which articles actually surface in users' feeds. If your team is publishing content hoping it reaches Discover without understanding the pipeline, give it a try. We built this to help publishers see what Google actually evaluates. We'd love your feedback.

Run the audit ▸

By Vahe Arabian

🤖 Publishers are rolling out agents – now comes the hard part

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.

As one revenue exec at a major publisher put it: "Programmatic is really due for an upgrade." 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," they said.

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," said the 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. As one industry exec stressed: "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:

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

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

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

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

“Affiliation, not just access”: Newsrooms try to move beyond membership to a focus on “belonging” | NiemanLab

Facing declining trust, unreliable social platforms, and search traffic weakened by AI summaries, the media industry is looking for a deeper way to hold onto audiences. Could the answer be a sense of “belonging”? “I think belonging is trying to figure out ways for the audiences to feel heard and seen, to engage or learn more,” said Matt Adams, director of audience growth and engagement at The Texas Tribune. In other words, it is less about broadcasting and more about listening.

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Winning subscribers in a digital era: Paywalls, onboarding and retention redefine news revenue strategies | Editor & Publisher Magazine

The formula for financially successful print newspapers of the past was straightforward. Maximizing paid subscriptions with low churn boosted circulation, attracting advertisers willing to pay premium rates to reach a large audience. Today, the print news product accounts for a much smaller portion of circulation and revenues. News organizations have had to expand their news and information products to include newsletters, podcasts, events, games, puzzles and more, primarily available in digital formats and online.

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Google Discover gives 54 publishers exclusive profile controls in secret pilot | PPC Land

Google today is the subject of new research showing that 54 publishers in the United States have quietly received control over their Google Discover profile pages - custom banner images, configurable link shelves, pinned posts - while more than 46,900 other publishers tracked by researchers have nothing. No application. No announcement. No Search Console toggle. Google appears to have simply chosen who gets in. The findings come from a systematic analysis published on May 12, 2026, by Sylvain Deaure and Damien Andell, co-founders of 1492.vision, a Google Discover analytics service that won the Innovation Award at SMX Paris 2026.

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Liquid content is reshaping journalism across platforms, products, and audiences | INMA

One of the strongest themes running through last week’s INMA World Congress of News Media in Berlin was the rise of what many executives called “liquid content” — journalism designed to move fluidly across platforms, formats, and audience experiences rather than existing as a single article, broadcast, or destination. In practice, the term refers to stories being created as adaptable assets that can become TikTok videos, YouTube explainers, podcasts, livestreams, newsletters, clips, social posts, live events, and subscription products simultaneously.

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Journalism must retire ‘no comment’ phrase, new survey from Reynolds Journalism Institute reveals | RJI

Public figures refusing to comment for news stories is now the norm — not the exception — according to the results of a new national survey. Conducted by the Reynolds Journalism Institute in partnership with research firm SmithGeiger, the survey asked both audiences and current and former journalists about their perceptions regarding “no comment” responses from sources. It quickly became apparent to researchers that a comment refusal is not a benign reality of the industry but, in fact, a major point of convergence for the crises of trust and hostility facing journalism.

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Why your brand isn’t making the AI recommendation set | Search Engine Land

We’ve been flooded with generative engine optimization (GEO) advice over the last couple of years – from checklists for AI citations to signal frameworks and technical guides explaining how to structure content for large language models. Most GEO advice converges around the same idea: If you want to be visible in AI-generated answers, you need to be structured, authoritative, and easy to extract. In my opinion, even though this information is extremely valuable and valid, it’s still incomplete if your brand is already positioning itself for a future where AI-generated answers dominate search.

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