SODP Dispatch - 27 August 2026

Complaints about online platforms often go nowhere. AI could actually be part of the solution

 By Vivi Tan

You know the feeling. Your account is suspended, your refund request is refused, or you’re still being charged for a cancelled subscription.

So you go to the company’s website for help and you find a chatbot. It offers a menu that doesn’t include your situation. There is no option to speak to a person. Eventually you give up.

Since the start of 2023, Australians have made 1,780 complaints about online retailers, marketplaces, search engines and social media platforms to the telecommunications industry ombudsman. In 2025, complaints were up 20% on the year before.

Account access problems were the most common problem, followed by disputes over charges and fees. More than seven in ten involved just five companies: Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Hubbl.

Unfortunately, all those complaints about online services made to the telecoms industry ombudsman fall outside its jurisdiction. No existing ombuds scheme can make a binding decision about them.

We need a dispute resolution system that can deal with these complaints, and there are precedents for this.

Digital problems cost the economy

The Consumer Policy Research Centre found four in five Australians had a problem with a digital service in the past year, and that unresolved problems cost an estimated $497 million annually. Two in three who complained were left dissatisfied.

Dissatisfaction was highest over refunds people believed they were entitled to (84%), followed by having no way to contact someone who could help (83%).

The centre says when people complained to online businesses and platforms, many had to deal with virtual customer service portals and AI chatbots that are unhelpful, give no explanation or offer inaccurate advice.

📊 Publisher Revenue Dinner Miami 2026

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 Data Foundation: Insights for Publishers Building Beyond the Pageview

Most publishers rely on external analytics platforms that were built for e-commerce and lead generation, not publishing. These tools measure traffic well but can't answer the questions that actually drive publishing businesses: Which content converts readers to subscribers? What behaviour predicts churn? Which authors drive retention? When your business model depends on understanding reader value beyond clicks, generic analytics consistently falls short.

The solution isn't abandoning external platforms, it's building a foundational data layer beneath them. Publishers who control their own analytics infrastructure can answer business-critical questions that generic tools weren't designed to address. External platforms still provide value for traffic monitoring and benchmark comparisons, but they measure what happened, not why readers converted or churned. That distinction matters enormously when editorial and commercial decisions depend on understanding reader behaviour at a deeper level.

Where to start : Identify your single most critical business question, whether subscription conversion or churn prevention, and build the minimum infrastructure to answer it. Practically, this means implementing server-side event tracking for paywall interactions, metered article counts, registration attempts, and subscription upgrades; establishing a unified reader identity framework that recognises readers across anonymous browsing, registration, and subscription states; and storing raw event data in a warehouse you control for flexible analysis and long-term access.

Privacy regulations make this even more urgent. Cookie restrictions and consent requirements mean publishers increasingly must manage how data is collected, stored, and processed. That responsibility can't be outsourced to a third-party platform indefinitely, and the publishers who act early will have a significant structural advantage over those who don't.

The payoff is significant. Custom infrastructure enables predictive churn modelling, dynamic paywall optimisation, personalised content recommendations, and automated audience segmentation, capabilities external platforms simply don't provide. Editorial teams gain clear visibility into what drives business outcomes, not just clicks. When external platforms change pricing or deprecate features, you're not held hostage. Your historical data remains accessible, and your business intelligence doesn't reset.

Start small, solve one problem well, and expand as your capabilities grow.

Key takeaways for publishers:

• External analytics weren't built for publisher-specific questions about conversion, churn, and content attribution

• Privacy regulations require publishers to control their own data collection infrastructure

• Start by identifying your most critical business question, then build minimum infrastructure to answer it

• Implement server-side event tracking for paywall interactions, registrations, and subscription behaviours

• Store raw event data in warehouses you control for flexible analysis and historical access
  

Google Search, Discover, AI, and YouTube redraw the news traffic map | INMA

The traditional traffic model for digital news publishers is undergoing a profound transformation as audiences move away from relying primarily on Google Search and increasingly consume news through Google Discover, social media, AI chatbots and video platforms. That was one of the central conclusions of a recent INMA Webinar, Discover, LLMs y YouTube: the new media traffic map, presented by Ignacio Zaccagnino, head of media growth at Spanish agency Nomadic.

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Is top-of-funnel content still worth it in 2027? | Search Engine Land

Organic search clicks have fallen 42% since AI Overviews began expanding in Google Search, while LLMs continue to fully answer users’ informational queries in-platform. At the same time, AI content production has allowed publishers to flood SERPs with top-of-funnel (TOFU) articles at scale — meaning competition for blue links has gone up, even as available clicks have decreased. Considering these factors, there’s a real question for content marketers: Is top-of-funnel content still driving traffic in any way that justifies writing it?

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The Independent AdTech Layer Is Disappearing. Here Is What That Means for Everyone Else. | Medium

I want to tell you something that has been happening in adtech all year, but that most people in the industry have been processing deal by deal instead of seeing as a pattern. In the last twelve months, four major independent adtech companies disappeared from public markets. IAS was taken private by Novacap for $1.9 billion in December 2025. LiveRamp was acquired by Publicis for $2.2 billion in May 2026. Criteo received a take-private offer from Vista Equity at a 30% premium in July 2026. And DoubleVerify was acquired by Nielsen for $2.15 billion on August 6, 2026.

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Big Tech faces its Big Tobacco moment: Meta strikes up to $US17.1bn deal over allegedly ‘addictive’ social media; Algos, scrolling, screen time curtailed; Rivals face the same squeeze | Mi3

For years, Silicon Valley’s growth machine has been built around a beautifully simple proposition: Remove every scrap of friction between a user and the next scroll, swipe, like, notification or algorithmically selected dopamine hit. US attorneys general have just lobbed a substantial spanner into those works. Meta’s settlement, overnight Australian time, goes deep into the engagement engine, putting clocks on teen attention, shutting Facebook and Instagram overnight, muzzling notifications, offering an escape hatch from algorithmic feeds and forcing pauses into the endless scroll.

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Judge Says Google/Publisher AI Situation “Seems Really Unfair” | SEJ

Google found itself pressed by Judge Amit Mehta about whether their monopoly position in Search enabled them to take publisher content and use it for AI answers. The exchange happened on Tuesday in a hearing to determine whether to grant Google’s request to dismiss Penske Media’s antitrust lawsuit over Google’s AI Overview feature. Judge Mehta is the same judge that previously found Google to have an illegal monopoly in Search. The Tuesday hearing centered on whether that monopoly finding gives Penske a viable claim.

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Publisher Ad Revenue News: How CTV and FAST Are Reshaping Monetization | Seedtag

Publisher monetization has entered a new phase. As streaming consumption officially surpasses linear television, advertising budgets are following audience attention into Connected TV (CTV), FAST channels, mobile apps, and other emerging digital environments. That shift is reshaping where publishers generate revenue and how they build sustainable monetization strategies. For publishers, this is one of the biggest stories in publisher ad revenue news today. Revenue growth no longer depends on expanding inventory alone.

Read more ▸