The January 2026 Bellwether report from Jounce Media makes one thing clear: the era of forced choices in enterprise monetization is over. For years, publishers had to decide between fully in-house or fully managed models. Now, as technology and operational expertise have evolved, so has the market. Hybrid monetization has matured into a durable, flexible [...]
This October was one of the strangest I’ve seen in a long time. If you felt like the ground was shifting under your feet as you navigated some unusual ad spend patterns, you were not alone. When things get unpredictable, it's easy to want to throw your hands in the air and say, "Well, the [...]
During my tenure at Freestar, the only real constant I’ve seen in digital advertising is change. Specifically, one of the biggest disruptors for publishers has been the evolving patchwork of privacy laws. A year ago, there were only nine US state privacy laws. Today, there are 20, with more planned - not to mention the [...]
When I joined Freestar two years ago, my friends asked the predictable question: Why jump back into adtech? My answer was simple: Because I had finally found a place where ‘publisher-first’ is more than a slide in a pitch deck. Every conversation here, even behind closed doors, starts with the question: Will this help our [...]
AI is, unsurprisingly, a hot topic across the adtech industry. You’ve got your evangelists who believe AI will eventually replace large portions of the workplace, and your skeptics who believe it’s an overhyped fad. The reality is probably somewhere in between. At Freestar, we’re proud to be taking a human-first approach, and we have no [...]
Freestar’s tenth-anniversary blog series is all about the inflection points that turned ‘publisher-first tech’ into ‘people-first tech’. As Freestar’s first Chief Revenue Officer, I work at the crossroads between publisher development, demand partnerships, and customer success, which means empowering a broad range of teams to do their best work. In this article, I’ll talk about [...]
