SODP Dispatch - 22 October 2026

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Open.Video Review (2026 Update)

By Sreemoyee Bhattacharya

Every video you upload to YouTube builds someone else’s business. The audience, the subscriber data, and the search visibility all live on Google’s turf, and YouTube keeps 45% of long-form ad revenue for the privilege.

Ezoic’s Open.Video offers publishers a different deal.

Host your video channel on your own domain, and let it do what the rest of your site already does: rank in search, drive traffic, build engagement, capture real subscriber data, and generate revenue that stays yours entirely.

Videos live on your own URLs, with SEO-optimized watch pages, a branded channel hub, and real subscriber emails you can take straight to your newsletter or CRM. It’s free, takes 0% of your ad revenue, and lets you monetize from the first view. Think of it as what WordPress did for blogging, now applied to video.

2026 brought a meaningful update too, including vertical video support and a new MCP integration for managing your channel through an AI client (both covered in detail below).

In this review, we walk through what Open.Video offers, how its pricing compares with YouTube, and where it still falls short, so you can decide whether it belongs in your video strategy.

What you will learn 💡

• What is Open.Video?

• What’s New in Open.Video in 2026?

• Paywall Feature

💬 We want to hear from you: Where does your video live today, on YouTube or on your own domain, and what would it take to move it? Hit reply and tell us; we read every response, and yours might help a future issue.

As AI takes on more tasks, what happens when people have to jump in to clean up after it?

By Murugan Anandarajan

Imagine an artificial intelligence system that has performed reliably for months. Its recommendations are almost always right, and the employee reviewing them has learned that close scrutiny rarely changes the outcome. Then something unusual happens. The AI makes an error or can’t proceed and needs human intervention. The employee is expected to step in and remains responsible for the outcome.

But does the employee know how to do the task?

I’m a professor of management information systems and the academic director of Drexel University’s Center for Applied AI & Business Analytics. In my research on human-AI relationships, I call this latent risk: the possibility that people may lose capabilities their organizations still depend on them to exercise.

AI can continue to perform well while the people overseeing it become less practiced at exercising independent judgment and less prepared to intervene. The risk becomes latent when the organization still depends on that human capability to step in but has little cause to notice that that capability may be weakening.

The concern is not entirely new. The idea of latent risk builds on decades of research into how people respond to automation. For example, studies of automation bias have shown that people can miss problems or follow automated recommendations even when other evidence suggests they should not.

What is different today is the role AI is beginning to play in organizations. It is beginning to assume larger parts of the analysis and decision-making that people previously performed.

💬 We want to hear from you: If your AI tools failed tomorrow, would your team still know how to do the work by hand? Hit reply and tell us; we read every response, and yours might help a future issue.

🎯 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

📈 Your Audience Data just got more valuable, to everyone else

Hey there, it's Vahe.

Spend on supply-side targeting doubled year on year in 2025. In plain terms, advertisers are paying more for audience data applied where the inventory comes from, rather than for bundles of ad slots. That data starts with publishers. The question I keep coming back to: how much of that value is reaching you, and how much is being kept by the people packaging it? Read the report coverage

Addressability is back on the agenda The cookie reprieve didn't last long as a talking point. Mobile operating system changes put targeting and measurement limits back at the top of this year's Prebid Summit. Logged-in readers are the hedge. Digiday on Prebid Summit

Block or bill? At Digiday's London town hall, publishers weighed blocking AI crawlers against the uncertain money in licensing. Agents don't see ads, so this is a pricing question as much as a legal one. What publishers said in London

We're taking all three into the room. On 10 November, 40 publisher leaders meet in London to answer what's worth building, what to stop paying for, and what to own, and everyone leaves with the room's answers in writing. A few seats are left. Apply for a seat · Can't make London? Join the US edition online, free

Newsrooms must restructure to adapt to an AI world | INMA

As newsrooms adapt to working with AI, their roles, structures, and mindsets are changing. A recent Newsroom and AI Master Class demonstrated how that is playing out in real-time at organisations worldwide. Gina Chua, executive editor at Semafor and executive director of the Tow-Knight Center at City University, New York, showed how quickly this shift is unfolding — and why journalists need to rethink their entire operating model.

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When hackers become sources: Inside the new craft of reporting on hacked data | Nieman Lab

Some consequential reporting of recent years has emerged thanks to what is normally defined as a “hack-and-leak,” a specific kind of cyberattack that results in the release of the information obtained by hackers. When Anonymous and allied collectives breached corporations and state agencies during the hacktivist wave of the 2010s, for instance, they turned stolen data into front-page news. Reporters covering the invasion of Ukraine have frequently worked with documents pulled from Russian institutions by hackers of different allegiances.

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Diversification by design: News media publishers pursue multiple paths to revenue | Editors & Publisher

The evolution of publishing has required revenue diversification. Whether a nonprofit newsroom, a community newspaper or a start-up, publishers are finding ways beyond traditional advertising and subscriptions to build more sustainable businesses. Editor & Publisher caught up with three news media executives to find out what’s working. The following Q&A has been edited for brevity and clarity.

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Meta wants to pay for its broad AI buildout with a newly created class of stock | TechCrunch

Meta is making a big push into AI, and it’s creating a new kind of stock that could help pay for it. On Wednesday, as the company reported its third-quarter earnings, Semafor reported the company might issue non-voting stock, meaning shares that don’t give their owners a vote on company decisions, to help fund its push into artificial intelligence. During Meta’s earnings call, the company confirmed that reporting. Meta’s chief financial officer, Susan Li, said the company plans to “create a new class of non-voting capital stock…”

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Could Google’s Ad Tech Ruling Reshape Publishers’ Operations? | A Media Operator

Google lost a landmark antitrust case over monopolistic practices in its ad tech business last year. It’s now required to implement behavioral remedies, which are expected to make the ad market fairer for publishers. What that actually looks like, however, remains to be seen. The changes are significant on paper. Google will have to disclose more about how its ad pricing works, remove mechanisms that favored its own AdX exchange, allow AdX to submit real-time bids to competing publisher ad servers.

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Your Audience Uses AI But Doesn’t Trust It – Build Content For The Gap | SEJ

Your audience is using AI while doubting it. New YouGov data shows people who worry about AI use it almost as often as people who don’t have concerns, which means usage tells you very little about whether anyone trusts what an AI system says about your category. That gap between use and trust is where marketing in the AI era now finds itself. Will Douglas Heaven framed the puzzle, “People really hate AI, so why can’t they get enough?” in his MIT Technology Review article on Oct. 5, 2026. He wrote, “Around the world, a love/hate attitude toward AI is very much the vibe right now.”

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