There comes a moment every publisher faces, usually around 2 AM during a critical outage, when they realise the truth: the ad tech stack they built to drive growth has become the thing preventing it.
This is not a technology problem. It is an economic reality that most publishers struggle to confront.
There comes a moment every publisher faces, usually around 2 AM during a critical outage, when they realise the truth: the ad tech stack they built to drive growth has become the thing preventing it.
This is not a technology problem. It is an economic reality that most publishers struggle to confront.
For a decade, complexity was a competitive advantage. The publishers who succeeded were those who could:
However, between 2020 and 2025, the equation changed.
Adding SSP number twelve stopped moving CPMs. Ad refresh strategies hit biological limits. Revenue plateaued while costs continued to climb.
Yet many publishers kept optimising. Why? Because the teams that built these systems, proud of their expertise, could not easily imagine a world where their creation was no longer the answer.
This is the complexity trap. And it is holding publishers back.
To understand how this happens, let’s look at a story. A fictional one, yet one that every publisher will recognise.
ABC Media is a digital-born group that grew up with the internet. From the start, it learned to balance creativity in content with excellence in monetisation. It quickly realised that advertising revenue was not only about salespeople, but also about technology.
In the early 2010s, growth was still driven by direct deals. But the rise of programmatic changed everything. Google Ad Manager, header bidding, and a growing list of SSP partners transformed the market. ABC Media embraced this revolution wholeheartedly. The company built strong adtech, yield, and ad ops teams that became the core engine of its success.
For years, every new partner integration or technical tweak brought that familiar rush — the thrill of uplift.
Then the magic stopped.
Adding new SSPs no longer made a significant impact. Ad refresh strategies reached their limits. Revenues plateaued, while operating costs continued to rise.
What had once been a strategic advantage, a sophisticated ad stack, slowly turned into a burden. It became complex, costly, and dependent on a handful of experts who were the only ones truly capable of keeping it running. Meanwhile, strategic projects like CTV, Retail Media, or curation struggled to take off because technical resources were stretched thin.
And then came the human side of the story.
The adtech team that had built this remarkable system between 2015 and 2025 was deeply attached to it, and rightly so. It was their creation, their masterpiece. Every time the “make or buy” question arose, the debate was long and passionate. They were proud, and often right, about being among the best.
But the financial logic no longer held.
This emotional attachment is something many publishers recognise. It is difficult to move on from what once defined your success.
As cost pressures increased, the imbalance became clear: too much time spent maintaining a complex system, too little on innovation. The result was a cycle of diminishing returns, with teams overloaded by maintenance rather than driving growth.
At that point, two paths emerged.
The first was to fully outsource monetisation to a sales house or external partner. Initially easier, but ultimately risky. When you relinquish control, the power balance shifts, especially when performance declines.
The second goal was to maintain strategic control while simplifying execution.
That is the path ABC Media chose to take.
By adopting Pubstack Monetisation Manager, the group rebuilt its advertising ecosystem around a new principle: less complexity, more efficiency. Within months, operating costs were reduced, performance stabilised, and the team could finally focus on value rather than maintenance.
This simplification freed up time and talent for new growth projects, including a FAST channel that quickly became a real revenue driver.
Programmatic monetisation became what it should have always been: a lever, not an obsession.
Today, one thing is clear: display and video programmatic are no longer businesses that can deliver double-digit growth year after year. Increasing investment will not make the equation simpler.
Yes, there is still room for optimisation, but not enough to justify heavy, costly technical setups.
If media groups want to reinvent themselves, they cannot afford to keep their best adtech and ad ops talents tied to systems with limited growth potential. They need to refocus, rationalise, and give their teams the space to build what comes next.
That is exactly what Monetisation Manager enables: restoring profitability in programmatic while keeping control, so publishers can invest their best people where it truly matters, in creating new, sustainable growth.
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