SODP Dispatch - 17 September 2026

Featured

The Traffic Playground by Kadam: An Invite-Only Party in Prague

 By SODP Staff

On September 27, Kadam will host The Traffic Playground: Prague Edition, a private, invite-only party for partners, advertisers, publishers, and other industry professionals.

Held during TES Prague, the event starts at 7 PM at LEVELS Prague and is organized in partnership with Flint Group.

The Traffic Playground is designed as a break from the usual conference pace. Instead of another formal networking event, guests can spend the evening in a more relaxed setting with arcade games, bowling, live performances, a DJ set, food, drinks, and Kadam Signature Cocktails.

The focus is simple: create an atmosphere where people can unwind, meet industry peers, and have conversations that happen more naturally away from the expo floor.

Attendance is limited, and access is available by invitation only. Those interested in joining can submit a request in advance. Approved guests will receive personal access details for the event.

Epom Ad Server Review 2026

 By Sreemoyee Bhattacharya

More than 72% of publishers use centralized ad serving systems to manage campaigns across various platforms. Modern-day publishers are looking to strike the perfect balance between control and operational flexibility. The publishing operation is not restricted to ad delivery or maximizing fill rates anymore. From inventory management and performance analytics to managing team workflows, and targeting, publishers have to navigate through a wide range of responsibilities, often scattered across multiple tools.

Naturally, as the need for operational discipline increases, publishers are looking for a unified platform that consolidates all the functions and makes ad operations seamless, while offering more options for effective customization.

This is where the Epom Ad Server comes into play. Serving as the single source of truth, Epom Ad Server brings multiple monetization workflows such as inventory management, ad serving, analytics, workflow automation and other aspects in a single ecosystem. Though platforms like this help with operational fragmentation and offer more control, they often come with certain limitations, such as complexity and a steeper learning curve for teams with limited technical resources.

In this review, we will essentially focus on the features of this ad delivery network, its reporting depth, customization features, and try to analyze whether it is a suitable platform for centralizing monetization worкflows for publishers without introducing any additional layer of complexity.

💬 We want to hear from you: If you've evaluated an all-in-one ad server like Epom, what tipped the decision, control, ease of use, or cost? Hit reply and tell us; we read every response, and yours might shape a future issue.

Big AI wants to slow down AI research. Is it a safety pause or a strategic retreat?

 By Andrew Cullen

Over the weekend, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei called for artificial intelligence (AI) companies, including his own, to slow down their work. Sam Altman and Elon Musk, heads of rivals OpenAI and xAI respectively, agreed.

The move reflects concern across the AI industry and more broadly about the dangers of new, rapidly improving systems. Recent high-profile incidents such as OpenAI AI agents hacking another company and hijacking a public website have shown current systems can break out of safety confines – and even more capable systems are in development.

Further complicating AI safety is the tension between safety and performance. Companies will be reluctant to limit the performance of their models in the name of safety for fear of losing ground to competitors. US President Donald Trump has also rejected calls for a slowdown, for fear of losing ground to China.

This means any successful effort at “pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up”, as Amodei puts it, will require significant cooperation between rival companies – and nations.

Risk minimisation

New technologies often bring new risks, and new concerns. Often governments, researchers and companies do find ways to manage those risks.

💬 We want to hear from you: Do you think a coordinated AI slowdown is realistic, or is it more posturing than policy? 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 ▸

🎯 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.

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By Vahe Arabian

🤖 Why llms.txt Won't Save You When AI Agents Come Shopping

llms.txt adoption is spiking. HTTP Archive data now tracks it as a dedicated SEO metric, and the 2025 Web Almanac recorded valid llms.txt files on over 2% of desktop and mobile sites, notable for a standard that barely existed two years ago. Anyone watching the e-commerce and publisher space can see why momentum is building.

When Google announced WebMCP in February, a structured protocol for AI agents to interact directly with websites, handling product search, configuration, and checkout, the industry's hunger for a fast, practical response was immediate. llms.txt became the low-friction option. Quick to deploy, accessible without deep engineering resources. A signal, however imperfect, that your site is thinking about AI legibility.

But here is where I want to slow the conversation down.

llms.txt was designed to tell large language models what your content is about. It was never designed to make your site executable by agents. That distinction matters enormously right now, and I am not sure enough people are treating it that way.

WebMCP's proposition is different in kind, not just degree. It introduces structured Declarative and Imperative APIs that let AI agents perform real actions, not just read content, such as navigating checkout, configuring products and filing support tickets, without touching your visual interface. The analogy I keep returning to: llms.txt is a brochure. WebMCP is a set of keys.

The bottleneck I am watching is not technical. It is organisational.

Publishers and retailers who rushed the llms.txt deployment in reaction to WebMCP are solving a visibility problem when the actual problem is operability. Agents that cannot complete a task on your site will route around it to a competitor's site they can operate on. Content legibility buys you consideration. Structural operability is what converts.

The e-commerce implications are significant:

• Product discovery via agents requires structured, machine-readable attributes, not just a text summary of your catalogue

• Checkout operability requires stable, predictable form structures that agents can traverse reliably

• Trust verification between agent and site is still largely unsolved; authentication, consent, and tool-call security remain unresolved areas across the agentic web standards landscape.

Over the years, the pattern has been consistent: the first wave deploys the easiest available signal. The second wave builds the right infrastructure. The gap between those two waves is where competitive advantage accumulates.

llms.txt adoption is not the problem. Mistaking it for the solution is.

For digital publishers and ecommerce operators, where does your current agentic readiness actually sit? Content legibility or structural operability?ms and fast-fix protocols for when agents underprice or miss guardrails.

Onmanorama reinvents history for Gen Z with AI-created video series | INMA

In an era where capturing audience attention is increasingly challenging, Onmanorama has introduced an innovative AI-driven video series that blends journalism, technology, and storytelling to engage younger audiences. The vertical video series How Many of You Know reimagines history for the digital age by using generative AI to bring lesser-known Malayali stories and personalities to life. Developed as a short-form, high-engagement format, the project is designed to connect with Gen Z and Gen Alpha audiences across platforms like Instagram and YouTube Shorts.

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New York Times training editor: Take these four steps before you roll out new things | NiemanLab

When I tell someone at work that I wrote a book called Saying No to New, I usually get a similar response each time. It’s something like, “But you advocate for new things here.” It’s true. At The New York Times, I’m a deputy editor on the newsroom development and support team. Our job is to help reporters and editors learn new skills and tools through training and product rollouts. We train colleagues on AI, storytelling formats, engaging in the comments, and much more. And we build new tools that save our coworkers time so they can focus on making journalism.

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Inside Wikipedia's Plan to Survive the Answer Engine Apocalypse | AdWeek

Wikipedia has spent 25 years building a reputation as one of the most trusted sources on the web. Now, as answer engines rewrite how people find information online, that reputation faces a threat familiar to many publishers: ubiquity without credit. According to the search engine measurement Ahrefs, ChatGPT cites Wikipedia more than almost any other single source, second only to Reddit. And yet, fewer humans are visiting the site itself to read, and more importantly, to edit.

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Uberall GEO experiment: YouTube content doubled AI mentions and citations | Search Engine World

A 90-day test found that structured, answer-focused video content improved visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, while exposing a bigger problem for multi-location brands. SAN DIEGO, Calif. – YouTube may be a more important part of generative engine optimization than many search marketers realize. That was one of the findings from a 90-day GEO experiment presented by Christian Hustle, Global AI Search Evangelist at Uberall, during BrightonSEO San Diego.

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Google Search Profile Badges Expose The Publisher Traffic Crisis | SEJ

Google published a brand new guide that explains how to add a Search Profile badge to websites in order to help audiences find the Search Profile. The Google Search profile badges themselves are a symptom of and a reaction to the decline in search traffic due to Google’s AI Search. What would be even better is if Google used the follower data to influence what other users see, thereby helping publishers gain a bigger audience while making users happier by showing them content that’s relevant to them.

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Buying Traffic Isn’t the Problem. Buying the Wrong Traffic Is | A Media Operator

In the Google Zero era, what is the role of buying traffic for publishers? It’s not a new tactic by any means. Arbitrage of heavily programmatic pages has been a tactic publishers have used for years; putting paid spend around social and multimedia content is a way of ensuring you deliver on the right number of views; and entire businesses like 1440, Morning Brew and others have grown massive email lists on cheap Meta ads. So, it should come as no surprise that, as Google traffic continues to decrease, publishers are going to be forced to spend more money on traffic.

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