The world's largest tech event has just wrapped up in Las Vegas, kicking off yet another year with incredible innovation and the refueling of several discourses on the major trends currently influencing tech and its related industries.
Of course, we wouldn’t miss out on the action—together with our co-founder and general manager, Cody Bye, we headed to the entertainment capital of the world to take part in this monumental global event.
This year’s CES gave us valuable insight into the challenges and opportunities currently shaping the publishing landscape, as well as a glimpse into what the future of our industry might hold. And while they say, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” Cody managed to bring back his key takeaways from our time at CES 2025.
Advertising's big CES comeback
The biggest overall trend that stood out to me this year was the feeling of advertising being attractive again.
There were a ton of marketers at the convention, which is a shift from previous years when retailers or C-level folks were simply there to look at what was new and to ink deals. Instead, we had marketers and advertisers everywhere, and the industry was there to chat with them.
I think part of that is due to the sheer number of screens that are going to be in and on just about everything around us moving forward. It’s not just TVs and smart devices anymore — it’s tractors, refrigerators, and more. Those new spaces aren’t detracting from the existing markets either, it’s all additive, as more and more marketers are looking for ways to reach consumers where they are.
The rise of traffic curation and AI-driven packaging
Diving deeper into our niche on the web, a key topic that stood out was “curation.” This concept of packaging traffic in specific or unique ways - was the trend that really dominated the digital monetization space in our circles.
A common point of interest was in how our traffic is going to be packaged for easy consumption by the marketers —they want to know who the traffic is and why they should be buying it in as simple a way as possible.
While AI hasn’t been particularly well received in the content creation space, AI around advertising was part of a number of presentations and definitely was part of the curation conversation.
AI does a great job of disseminating data into packages (if the parameters are queued in correctly), and that’s certainly going to be a discussion point for many SSPs and DSPs in the future.
Challenges and opportunities for publishers
We’ll start with the challenges first, and that’s going to be the continued threat of AI content creation taking the place of hand-made, higher quality articles, videos, and other content. We’ve already seen this impacting a number of publishers in our niche.
However, there are still a huge number of opportunities out there for web publishers. There are so many new products, innovations, and ideas that are emerging every day that I can’t help but think back to when I was a journalist and wonder how I’d ever be able to write about them all. It’s no longer just graphics cards and monitors that need to be covered—it’s AI in games, XR, the interfaces between the real and the digital, and so much more.
On the purely advertising side, we’re also seeing some exceptional work being done to continue to make advertising an enjoyable experience for the user, with different formats and efforts to clean up the advertising space. Cookies are slowly transitioning out and being replaced with first-party data. Generally, it’s just turning into a much better ecosystem than even 5-6 years ago.
The future of monetization
The ad industry is always evolving. We’re seeing brands becoming very interested in making connections with users rather than simply peppering them with ads.
Contextual advertising (providing ads on a page that are similar to the page’s content) has never gone out of style, but it certainly has taken a back burner to cookie-based targeting.
To me, this makes way more sense as a user—even though I may have gone to Safeway or Fred Meyer for my groceries, I don’t necessarily need to see those ads when I’m on a gaming website. Contextual targeting does a much better job of surfacing relevant ads to users and is something that I think is going to be much more effective soon.
A boom year for advertising
Advertising may have been in a bit of a lull the last few years post-Covid, but I think we’re going to start a bit of a boom in 2025.
Advertisers and marketers seem eager to spend, and we’ve adjusted to how the new trends in gaming, entertainment, and shopping impact advertising. With all of that in mind, I think we’re going to see a large influx of cash heading through advertising pipes, and that will be great for everyone in the ecosystem.
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