SODP Dispatch - 5 February 2026

HilltopAds Review 2026

By Sreemoyee Bhattacharya

While advertisements serve as an important source of revenue for publishers and content creators, disruptive ads often hinder the user experience and cause visitors to skip a website or piece of content. 67% of users get disinterested and often navigate away from websites or videos owing to interruptive advertising experiences. With almost 32.5% of internet users using ad blockers in 2025-2026, publishers tend to lose 10% to 40% of their advertising revenue.

With ad blockers causing a huge paradigm shift, today’s publishers often find themselves in a tight spot. While fewer ads restrict the scope of revenue, aggressive advertising might lead to abrupt bounce rates. Naturally, publishers are reconsidering the way ads are being delivered. They are constantly struggling to find ad solutions that can turn traffic into revenue without coming in the way of user experience or pushing visitors away. Not just user control- they are looking for monetization platforms that offer the perfect combination of flexibility, scalability, and format diversity.

This is where HilltopAds comes into play. Ad blockers have a diverse impact on traditional formats like banner ads, costing publishers significant revenue opportunities. Keeping the modern-day requirements of publishers in mind, HilltopAds has been designed as an alternate ad network that makes sure publishers don’t have to count on traditional display advertising.

📰 The Editor's Crisis Handbook

Breaking news shouldn't break your workflow. This guide tackles editorial drag, the friction when publishing systems can't keep up with live events. WP Engine Newsroom addresses this with three features: Live News for real-time updates without page refreshes, Unpublished Edits for safe version control during urgent changes, and Editor Tabs that let multiple team members work on text, metadata, and media simultaneously without locking each other out. If your newsroom still wrestles with WordPress conflicts during breaking news, this outlines a structured alternative built for velocity without sacrificing accuracy.

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🔄 Google AI Traps Your Clicks

Google made it official, now Google Search AI Overviews will let you do a follow up question after clicking on the "Show more" button and that follow up question will take you directly into AI Mode. This might lead to less clicks to your website and more traffic into Google AI Mode.

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📊 The 2025 Web Almanac

The web doesn't stand still and neither does the data that tracks it. The HTTP Archive's 2025 Web Almanac is here: the most comprehensive snapshot of how the web actually works, built from 16.2 million websites and 244 terabytes of real-world data. This isn't speculation or trend-chasing. It's 15 chapters covering page content, user experience, publishing, and distribution, written by 70 web experts who volunteered countless hours to make sense of what's really happening across the internet. Whether you're optimizing performance, rethinking your CMS strategy, or trying to understand how content gets discovered in 2025, this is the report that connects raw stats to real insight. The kind of clarity you can actually build a strategy around.

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By Vahe Arabian

⚡ Beyond Rankings: The Content Formats AI Search Can't Replace

AI summaries are killing commodity content, but not everything.

The content that’s still winning shares one thing in common: its value can’t be extracted without user action, context, or participation.

Based on what’s actually working right now, here are the alternatives publishers should be paying attention to 👇 :

1. Interactive experiences

   Quizzes, assessments, configurators, calculators. Not because they’re “engaging,” but because the value doesn’t exist until the user interacts. AI can explain. It can’t do the work for you.

2. Systems of record, not explanations

   Benchmarks, trackers, live datasets, market maps, and regulatory updates. These aren’t “how things work” pages. They’re where people check reality repeatedly. Freshness + ownership beats optimisation.

3. Decision-support content

   Comparison engines, trade-off visualisers, prioritisation frameworks. AI can list options. It can’t resolve your constraints. When the stakes are real, users still click.

4. Video that shows proof, not opinions

   Walkthroughs, demos, process recordings. AI can summarise text. It can’t replicate visual evidence, trust, or human presence.

5. Participation-driven content

   Communities, discussions, user contributions. The value isn’t the information; it’s the interaction. And it keeps growing after publication.

The shift isn’t: “How do we rank?” It’s: “What value only exists after someone clicks?”

The brands winning in AI search aren’t producing more content. They’re building experiences, systems, and infrastructure that can’t be summarised away.

Curious what formats others are seeing work right now.

When big tech is saving democracy and the fourth estate | Media Finance Monitor

There is a specific kind of intellectual comfort in the “Fourth Estate” model of journalism. A very prestigious newsroom with serious journalists wearing serious suits looking at serious news and holding the powerful accountable. Back in the late 1990s I got into journalism in no small part because of this “All the President’s Men” branding. But the reality of how we now hold power accountable is shifting toward something far more decentralized. After ICE agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota, the Trump administration’s response was blunt: the victims were agitators, domestic terrorists, they were out to harm federal agents who acted in self-defense.

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Ad Industry Agentic Protocols Are Multiplying—But Adoption Still Remains Elusive | Adweek

The advertising industry is no stranger to standards wars. But as agentic buying tools move from experimentation toward early deployment, the question has shifted to which new frameworks are actually worth the effort to adopt. Over the past six months, the industry has seen a wave of new protocols aimed at enabling agent-to-agent advertising interactions, including the IAB Tech Lab’s Agentic RTB Framework (ARTF), AdCP and Amazon’s MCP efforts, which remain largely confined to Amazon’s own ecosystem. Each protocol operates slightly differently.

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New York Times Added 1.4 Million Digital Subscribers in 2025 | The New York Times

The New York Times added 1.4 million digital-only subscribers in 2025, including about 450,000 in the last quarter of the year, the company said on Wednesday. The Times ended the year with 12.78 million total subscribers, a jump that puts it on a pace to reach its stated goal of 15 million by the end of 2027. The increase was due in part to upgrades to family subscriptions, which The Times introduced in September. Family subscriptions allow up to four users to share one account. Each of those subscriptions, which are priced higher than individual subscriptions, is counted as two subscribers.

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YouTube Expands Auto-Dubbing to All Creators | SocialMediaToday

YouTube is expanding its auto-dubbing options to all creators, which will provide more opportunities for YouTubers to reach expanded audiences by translating their content for various audiences. YouTube first launched auto dubbing with selected creators back in 2024, providing the opportunity to auto-translate content into eight different languages. And now, with YouTube making auto-dubbing available to all users, it’s also expanding this to 27 languages that are now supported by YouTube’s auto-translation tools.

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What higher ed data shows about SEO visibility and AI search | Search Engine Land

AI search hasn’t killed SEO. Now you have to win twice: the ranking and the citation. Google searches for almost anything today, and there’s a good chance you’ll see an AI Overview before the organic results, sometimes even before the ads. That summary frames the query, shortlists sources, and shapes which brands get considered. AI Overviews now appear for about 21% of all keywords, according to Ahrefs. And 99.9% are triggered by informational intent. Search rankings still matter. But AI summaries increasingly determine who wins early consideration.

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