The more time you spend creating high-quality content and growing your audience, the better. Efficiency is taking back as much of the time and resources you spend elsewhere as you can.

Specifically, you should focus on building a lean ad tech stack, using AI strategically, expanding to channels with the biggest opportunity for audience growth, and demanding the most useful analytics from your tools. The next wave of growth will come from those who remove points of friction and focus on running their core business smarter.

1. Start cutting out the vendors between you and your revenue

Most of the tools in your ad tech stack were never designed to work together. One tool probably helps monetize display, while another helps manage video or handles the ad auction. Plus, since the money flows from the demand side of the house, most of them were built to give advertisers the advantage.

That’s still true today in the way most systems operate. Publishers rarely get access to the controls like real-time auction data, bid-level reporting, or tools to fine-tune performance beyond setting basic price floors. You can’t see why a high-value bid didn’t win, or how timeout thresholds are impacting your revenue.

Even small changes, like adjusting ad pressure or comparing different yield strategies,  require manual configuration across multiple vendors, each with their own limitations. And since none of these systems were built to work together, you’re stuck reconciling fragmented data and making decisions with partial visibility.

According to the latest estimates, programmatic advertising was worth $546 billion in 2023. By 2028, it’s expected to reach $779 billion. But around 20% of that value has traditionally gone to intermediaries—fees paid to DSPs, SSPs, and other platforms sitting between publishers and advertisers. That means in 2028, $155 billion will be taken from those who actually build audiences and create content. For individual media businesses, that cost shows up in smaller but equally painful ways: lower margins, slower pages, and a stack of disconnected vendors that are impossible to manage as a system.

Take LCHF-arkivet, a Swedish recipe site, for example. It has a loyal audience and substantial organic traffic. Over time, it developed relationships with multiple vendors to monetize that audience. Each partner worked alone, optimizing for their piece of the page. As a result, user experience and revenue suffered.

LCHF-arkivet didn’t need more partners; it needed fewer, better ones. Ultimately, they worked with Sparteo to deploy Actirise, which replaced their fragmented tech stack with one solution.

Sparteo now manages display and video, connecting to over 100 demand sources through Flashbid and using AI to control ad pressure, timeouts, pricing, and formats based on page performance. LCHF-arkivet saw a 17% increase in RPM in the first month, and by the second, RPM had grown by 50%.

Actirise also includes FastCMP, Sparteo’s integrated consent platform, designed to keep monetization running smoothly by capturing consent without delays or data loss. For LCHF-arkivet, that meant one less external vendor to manage. Plus, consent decisions are processed instantly without handing off data between systems.

You don’t need to start from scratch to get similar results, but you do need to stop giving away margin and time to vendors that don’t talk to each other.

2. Work with partners who own their infrastructure

Most ad tech platforms don’t control the infrastructure they run on. Their delivery systems are built on top of public cloud providers and third-party services, which means every optimization or fix depends on someone else’s environment. If a CDN edge node fails, if latency spikes in a third-party queue, or if logs drop midstream, they can’t intervene directly. They wait. That introduces a layer of distance between you and the teams meant to support your revenue.

Owning infrastructure changes what a partner can do for you:

• They can see problems in real-time
• They can fix problems before they affect your site
• They can push optimizations directly without waiting for another company’s approval
• They can keep latency low because nothing has to travel farther than it needs to

When your site is slow or broken for too long, it drags down your Core Web Vitals, which has a direct impact on your user experience. Research shows that users are 24% less likely to abandon the page when a site passes the Core Web Vitals assessment.

And when you’re relying on multiple vendors, every sync adds overhead. The more systems passing data between each other, the more performance slows and the greater the risk of data leakage. Systems built and tuned as a whole are simply more efficient: they use less energy , trigger fewer redundant calls, and leave a smaller environmental footprint.

Sparteo runs its entire suite on its own infrastructure without partners like Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. The entire stack, including the video player, was built from scratch and is maintained in-house.

This keeps delivery fast, eliminates third-party overhead, and gives Sparteo full control over system performance. For publishers, that translates to smoother video playback, faster page loads, a reduced carbon footprint, fewer redundant ad calls, and tighter data governance.

3. Use AI to grow ad margins and serve more relevant content

Every publisher knows AI is part of their business's future; the question is where to focus. There are dozens of possibilities that look useful in isolation, from optimizing bids to predicting engagement, summarizing articles, writing headlines, and generating video captions.

But when time and resources are limited, the real challenge is figuring out which will actually make you more efficient. The most consistent returns come from using AI in two places: ad auctions and content tagging.

Use AI to optimize your ad auction

Accurately pricing your ad inventory is difficult. Static or manually adjusted price floors can cause you to undervalue or overprice your impressions and lose revenue. Advertisers often capitalize on these inefficiencies, buying your valuable inventory at lower prices than they're worth. Without precise, dynamic adjustments, you risk leaving money on the table.

AI can solve this problem by dynamically setting price floors based on real-time predictions of each impression’s true value. If you have extensive data, including user behavior, context, and historical performance, you can accurately determine the optimal price at which your inventory should sell.

SONAR, Sparteo’s predictive performance engine, uses AI to perform this task. It evaluates over 100 data points for every impression, predicting with 99.9% accuracy how valuable that impression will likely be.

Use AI-driven content tagging to monetize your video inventory

Tags assign descriptive metadata, keywords, and classifications to your video content. Effective tagging is important for monetizing all your video inventory, whether hosted on your website, distributed through social platforms like YouTube, or streamed via Connected TV (CTV). Clear, accurate tagging directly impacts how easily advertisers can discover and target your content, ultimately influencing revenue.

Sparteo’s AI tools combine the power of automation with consistency at scale. When your content is classified the same way across platforms, it becomes easier to package, easier to sell, and easier to control. These tools help you do that without adding manual overhead.

Discovery, built by Viously, automatically pairs the most relevant video with each article using semantic matching. It scores relevance, creates dynamic playlists, and updates video selections without any manual tagging or embedding.

Overwatch is Sparteo’s brand safety and suitability solution. It analyzes URL context across all channels, including CTV, and provides scalable classification for safer monetization.

These solutions don't just increase ad fill. They structure your content business in a way that makes inventory easier to navigate, safer to monetize, and more aligned with how advertisers actually buy. You stay in control while the system does the work.

4. Jump on the opportunity CTV offers to grow your video audience

More videos are being watched than ever before, and not just on phones and laptops. Audiences now move between the web, mobile apps, and connected TVs, but distribution strategy hasn’t kept up for many businesses. Video is still handled in silos, built for desktop or mobile, but rarely adapted for streaming.

If you have the right partner to help you distribute your organic video content through CTV apps or FAST channels with minimal lift from your team, you can repackage it for CTV to expand your audience and find more revenue opportunities. Sparteo’s partners have already been successful in doing so through Viously.

Sparteo aligns inventory packaging with what buyers expect from traditional television: predictable formats, category-level segmentation, and program-level targeting, which means you don’t need another intermediary to sell into advertiser CTV budgets.

5. Don’t settle for less than page-level insights

You might know your overall site traffic or see changes in CPMs, but you're missing crucial insights without detailed visibility at the page level. You need to know exactly why a particular article or page performed the way it did to truly maximize revenue. General analytics aren't enough either; you need clarity on specific performance drivers like traffic sources, content topics, authors, and user behavior.

To solve this, you need a partner who can give you analytics at the individual page level. Actirise, Sparteo’s solution for those who need to intelligently manage their display ads, has an analytics tool that connects revenue and engagement data directly to individual articles and pages. It provides real-time visibility into:

• Revenue and engagement metrics live at the article level
• Which content is driving the highest RPM
• Instant alerts about sudden performance shifts, enabling quick responses
• Insights about how different authors or traffic sources impact monetization
• Recommendations on adjustments quickly to maintain and improve performance

When you can instantly see what specific changes make or lose money, you spend less time guessing and more time growing revenue.

The fewer moving parts, the faster your business can grow

In 2025, the difference between merely surviving and genuinely thriving in the media landscape comes down to how clearly you can see the link between your daily decisions and their revenue impact.

Efficiency isn't just about doing things faster or cheaper; it's about eliminating guesswork entirely. When your tools provide immediate, actionable insights, you're not just solving today's problems; you're building a system that continuously learns, adapts, and proactively improves your media business.

*Contact our team to see how Sparteo can simplify your ad stack and drive more revenue with clearer, real-time insights.*

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