Freestar

We are so proud of the dedication and hard work from our team members. We want to recognize the following people who are celebrating their well-deserved Promotions and Internal Moves: Francisco Cadillo Hasbun - OB Success Manager Krystyna Chupak -  Sr. OB Success Manager Sky Roth- Senior PSE Carlos Cortorreal - PSE Richard P. - Senior DSE Stephen Sabo - Manager, PSE Adam King - VP, Publisher Development Shelby Corso - Senior CSM Nikita Prokhin - Senior CSM- Team Lead Matt Williams - BI Analyst Lindsay Valdez - VP, Audience Strategy and Inventory Quality Cooper Merkow - Director, Publisher Development Gregory Oliver - Senior QA Engineer Caio Gandra - Director, Engineering Wesley Hall - Senior Engineer Vynicius Pontes - Staff Engineer James Lamb - Senior Manager, Eng Martin Hill - SVP Engineering, Ad Platform Christos Kargidis - Senior Data Scientist Neil Murphy - Engineering Manager Nishit Parmar - Director, BI & Analytics Ana Pankiv - Senior Software Engineer

A recent piece in ADWEEK spotlights another shift publishers can’t ignore: Google is testing AI-generated headline rewrites, meaning publishers have less control over how their work is presented before a reader ever lands on their site. This creates some real implications for publishers. A headline is usually the first insight the reader has into what’s on a web page. When that framing is subjectively changed, so can the meaning, context, and brand identity. In these turbulent times when AI is rapidly changing search, Freestar is seeing that the strongest publishers are the ones doubling down on the fundamentals: producing quality content that audiences trust, building direct relationships, improving the user experience, and creating cleaner environments so that every visit is valuable. The changes to search and discovery will most certainly continue. But publishers with strong brands and loyal readers are in a much better position than those still dependent on Google traffic alone. Read the story here: https://lnkd.in/gCz_RvVN #PublisherFirst #AIAge #FreestarTakes

Are you leaving money on the table with your ad monetization strategy? For publishers, choosing the right banner ad sizes is the critical first step to optimizing revenue. At Freestar, we live and breathe ad operations, and we've put together a guide to our top-performing, high-impact units. Read the full guide to unleash your true revenue potential: https://lnkd.in/gG8WSRzs #PublisherFirst #AdMonetization #PublisherTips #AdTech #ProgrammaticAdvertising

March was a busy month for the Freestar team! 🚀 Instead of just talking about the future of ad tech, we spent the last few weeks actively listening to the people who are building it. We recently hosted our 2nd Annual Publisher Forum, bringing together some of the world's most trusted publishers to hear exactly what they’re struggling with right now. Their candid feedback directly informs how we run our business and how we are shaping pubOS to solve your biggest challenges. We also took the conversation to the (sadly balmy and earth-toned) slopes of Vail, CO, during Digiday Publishing Summit, where we co-hosted an amazing private dinner and happy hour with one of our newest pubOS partners, The Media Trust. 🏔️🥂 pubOS isn’t being built in a silo; it’s being built on the foundation of real publisher feedback and powerful industry partnerships. Thank you to everyone who joined us this month! 👇 Check the comments below for links to learn more about pubOS and to join our partner waitlist! What is the biggest challenge your ad ops team is facing going into Q2? Let us know below! #Freestar #pubOS #AdTech #Publishers #DigidayPublishingSummit #TheMediaTrust #Programmatic #PublisherMonetization

The industry is changing rapidly, but our mission remains the same: Publisher First. We are actively hiring and looking for passionate, driven individuals to join our mission. If you're looking or a culture that values innovation, growth, and its people, we'd love to meet you. Check out our open roles, linked in the comments.

New research from Dartmouth College and the University of Oxford draws a line the ad industry has been blurring for years. Ads placed next to objectionable content—hate speech, extremism, genuinely harmful material—damage brand trust by nearly 18%. That's real, and it matters. But here's what the same research found: that effect disappears when the content is simply negative or difficult. Hard news about conflict, economic turmoil, public health crises—none of it produced the same brand damage. This distinction is not a technicality. It's the difference between brand safety and brand avoidance—and conflating the two has quietly defunded some of the most trusted journalism on the internet. Blunt keyword blocklists that prevent ads from running next to any mention of war, death, or politics aren't protecting brands. They're demonetizing the publishers audiences actually trust—and sending those ad dollars toward lower-quality inventory where the real brand risk lives. The research validates what premium publishers have known for a long time: context is what matters. A Reuters dispatch on a global crisis is not the same as a white supremacist forum. Treating them as equivalent isn't safety—it's a failure of targeting. Freestar works with DeepSee.ai and Ad Fontes Media to monitor supply quality continuously, and our Jounce Media Bellwether publishers represent the most independently vetted, brand-safe inventory in digital publishing. Real brand safety is precise. It protects advertisers and the publishers that inform the world. Read the full story from Science Says: https://lnkd.in/gbDm64B4 #Publishing #AdTech #BrandSafety #PublisherFirst #Freestar

That’s a wrap on our 2026 Publisher Forum! A huge thank you to all the publishers who joined us last week. The energy, candor, and forward-thinking ideas in the room were exactly what make this community so powerful. We dove into the most critical challenges and opportunities facing the industry today. Here are a few of the big themes we're still thinking about: 💡 Community Over Competition: In the AI era, the power of publishers banding together is stronger than ever. Collaboration is the new competitive edge. 📈 Beyond Data, Toward Insight: The conversation has shifted from just collecting data to finding the "why" behind it, focusing on holistic measurement and true customer lifetime value. 🏆 The Publisher as a Brand: With traffic sources evolving, building a resilient, trusted brand and diversifying revenue streams is no longer optional, it's essential for growth. At Freestar, our promise is to always be publisher-first, and the insights from this event are crucial in shaping how we deliver on that promise. The conversation wouldn't have been the same without our incredible speakers. Huge thanks to: ⭐ Our all-star publisher panel, Jeff Li, Jay Glogovsky, and Christina Kurteva (Wartski), for sharing such candid insights. ⭐ Matthew Scott Goldstein (msg) for his sharp thoughts on navigating the AI landscape. ⭐ Gareth Glaser for an awesome talk about the metrics that really matter for publishers today. The full discussion and case studies were exclusive to attendees, but the insights are too important not to share. If you're a publisher and want to learn more about the strategies discussed, drop us a comment. We’d be happy to walk you through it. #PublisherFirst #DigitalPublishing #AdTech #Monetization #FutureOfPublishing #Community

It’s easy to add a comments section to your site, so why not? Because it might be your most expensive page element. We hear publishers talk about User Generated Content (UGC) as a community win, but it also changes how programmatic advertising evaluates every page. Tiny UGC pockets can still cause brand safety damage when one outlier slips through. Content moderation cannot be an afterthought. It needs real coverage, rules, and escalation. Not sure what to do about UGC? Phil Bohn, our SVP of Demand, has laid out a buyer-first way to make the call in his latest thought leadership piece: https://lnkd.in/gpc_mMKy #DigitalPublishing #AdTech #Monetization

The traffic data keeps getting worse—and AI Overviews aren't the only reason. New research from Aleyd Solis analyzing four U.S. verticals across January 2025 to January 2026 found that classic organic click share dropped between 11 and 23 percentage points in a single year. The biggest culprit wasn't AI. It was text ads—gaining 7 to 13 percentage points of click share across every single vertical. Google is remonetizing the SERP. Organic results aren't just competing with AI Overviews. They're competing with a paid layer that's quietly doubled its click capture in product verticals in one year. For publishers, the implication is direct: the traffic model built on organic search is being squeezed from two directions simultaneously—AI on one side, paid monetization on the other. Neither is temporary. This is why we keep saying the old traffic playbook is broken. It's not a blip, it's structural—and it's happening faster than most revenue models have adjusted for. The publishers navigating this well share a common thread: they're not waiting for Google to send traffic. They're building direct audience relationships, optimizing for the visitors they do get, and making sure every impression works harder. That's exactly the work Freestar's Audience Development team does alongside publishers every day—AEO and GEO optimization, newsletter monetization, first-party data strategy. When traffic gets harder to earn, the value of each visit goes up. We help publishers capture it. https://lnkd.in/gFExxSsU #Publishing #AdTech #AIAge #PublisherFirst #Freestar