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Gen Z — it’s a group that can feel like an elusive, rare species to today’s publishers. How do these young adults get their news? And are they even consuming news at all in the traditional sense?

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After protests from creators over a delay in the launch of Fortnite’s official “Squid Game” integrations, Epic Games has said it will better coordinate future IP rollouts to align with the original properties’ release dates.

“Squid Game” is Netflix’s most popular series of all time, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at Fortnite. The platform is currently devoid of any creator-made “Squid Game” experiences — and not due to any lack of interest on creators’ part. Creators on one of the top gaming platforms are currently unable to monetize what has become one of the world’s most prominent media properties during the hype period following its June 27 release.

Fortnite has long been home to fan-made “Squid Game” islands, with titles like “Octo Game 2” and “Squid Guys” building organic audiences on the platform since the first season dropped in September 2021. But after Epic Games announced an official “Squid Game” licensing agreement with Netflix last month, the company started to crack down on these unlicensed experiences, removing them from the platform entirely. So far, the only sanctioned integration is a “Squid Game” section within “Reload,” an experience created in-house, not by the creator community.

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Instagram is ramping up efforts to drive interest in its Creator Marketplace with a brand new, 26-page how-to document for marketers — aimed at making the whole process quick and painless. All they need is a business account and access to Meta’s business suite to get the ball rolling.

In July 2022, Instagram started testing its initial marketplace feature, but it was only available on an invite-only basis to select business and creator accounts. Three years later, the image-based platform has opened the doors to what the set-up guide describes as “the best place for brands to discover and evaluate creators for partnership ads”. As the guide states: “you will learn how to access creator marketplace, and discover, evaluate, and connect with creators for your next campaign.”

Having seen the importance of creators to Instagram, it’s no surprise that Meta wants to go one step further and make the collaboration between brands and creators as seamless as possible. And it probably helps that the feature helps keep Instagram in line with its main platform competitor TikTok and its own creator marketplace.

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This week’s Media Briefing looks at the rise of the AI browser war, and what this means for publishers who are already feeling the pressure of declining referral traffic due to AI search tools.

• AI browsers could accelerate the decline of search traffic, and push publishers to find more ways to make money from AI companies, execs said.
• Google Discover adds AI summaries, Washington Post creates new “Futures” team, and more.

What the AI browser war means for publishers

Some days, it feels like publishers are stuck inside a disintermediation hamster wheel.

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The 2025 upfront season is starting to wrap, with sources claiming digital is on the precipice of dominating spend, bringing a new paradigm to negotiations.

It’s one where sellers’ ability to offer granular measurement of ROAS, and decipher how CPMs are structured, matters as much as the stars of a primetime show when it comes to winning the lion’s share of advertiser budgets. As ad spend on streaming prepares to surpass media investment on linear TV at the upfront negotiations, this is especially the case.

Earlier this week, such debate dominated Digiday’s first-ever CTV Ad Strategies event, hosted in midtown Manhattan, where attendees voiced their frustrations about the fusion of these previously distinct worlds, as well as their successes.

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Traditional ad models may no longer deliver the revenue publishers need, but better audience strategies can. With privacy regulations tightening, the role of third-party cookies evolving and digital platforms capturing a greater share of advertiser spend, it’s harder than ever for resource-strapped publishers to monetize through legacy channels. With a digital landscape as complex and fragmented as it is today, many publishers are unaware of how much revenue they lose due to stagnant or inefficient ad strategies. 

“Traditional advertising models are increasingly misaligned with how audiences engage today,” said Georgia Gkolfinopoulou, senior marketing strategist at Marigold. “Static ad formats, untargeted messaging and siloed monetization efforts limit publishers’ ability to create meaningful, revenue-driving experiences.”

Publishers can find a path forward by rethinking how they use owned channels like email, mobile and on-site experiences not just as communication tools, but as engagement and data-collection vehicles. Hearst UK, for example, recently modernized its email marketing strategy with real-time personalization and embedded dynamic content to improve consumer engagement and maximize revenue. 

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YouTube has been making overtures to agencies and brand advertisers in the hope they’ll increase their media investments with the Google-owned video platform.

The platform’s execs have been underlining YouTube’s new position at the top of the TV pyramid in conversations with media buyers, while emphasizing ad products like Peak Points and YouTube Select, as well as its TikTok competitor Shorts.

“Everything in the sales pitch from Google right now to agencies is YouTube, YouTube, YouTube,” said Kris Tait, chief business officer at media agency Croud. He didn’t reveal specific figures, but told Digiday that spending by Croud’s clients on YouTube had risen almost 50% in the first half of 2025. Neither company responded to requests for comment.

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at the tensions bubbling up in the TV ad market as some TV networks press Nielsen to postpone its decision to deprecate panel-only measurement.

• A measurement mess
• The modern creator career path
• Apple’s F1 bid, YouTube’s AI slop sweep and more

A measurement mess

Likely one of the more contentious meetings of this year’s upfront cycle happened on June 12. That was when more than two dozen TV network executives and industry trade organization VAB sat down with Nielsen.

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The IAB Tech Lab is working to assemble a task force of publishers and compute edge companies to kick off its plan to create a technical framework that helps publishers gain better control of, and be paid for, LLM crawling. 

So far, it has roughly a dozen publishers on board for the task force, who will meet for the first workshop in New York City on July 23 (next Wednesday), to discuss next steps for what it has called its LLM Content Ingest API framework. Edge compute company Cloudflare will also attend and speak at the meeting, and the IAB Tech Lab is working to get edge compute company Fastly on board as well, according to CEO Anthony Katsur.

It’s early days, so next steps entail writing the specification — essentially the blueprint or technical guide that will help the different stakeholders (publishers, tech vendors, platforms) build toward the same standard. IAB Tech Lab has an internal draft specification that it’s in the early stages of reviewing with publishers, according to Katsur. Over the last six weeks, it has pitched the overview of this specification (see below) to around 40 publishers globally. 

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At this point, it’s clear generative AI adoption has reached critical mass among marketers and advertisers in everything from ideation to content creation. What’s less clear, however, is AI’s return on investment.

For an industry that’s obsessed with ROI, few businesses have developed straightforward frameworks for measuring and understanding the impact their AI investments are having. 

CMOs are measuring the benefits of AI across a range of metrics: time saved, payroll cost reductions or consumer sentiment. Each has their pros and cons, but few can be applied across the breadth of a business. And so far, a standard dashboard hasn’t yet emerged.

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Holdcos keep talking up AI. Omnicom put it on the record. Its chief technology officer took a lead role on the earnings call on Tuesday (July 15), putting the tech — and the business case — squarely in focus.

Like its peers, Omnicom is in flux. A solid second quarter, with revenue up from $4.02 billion from $3.61 billion a year ago, followed a sluggish start to the year. Blame the usual suspects: a jittery macro economic climate, a slowdown in digital ad growth. But the real shift — the one reshaping the ground beneath them — is AI.

Which explains why Paolo Yuvienco, Omnicom’s chief technology officer, was on the call.

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What began as a supposed rebellion against traditional media is now increasingly modeled after it — the creator economy — complete with middlemen, agency layers, and bundled tech stacks promising growth, monetization, and brand safety. In other words: business as usual.

Managing creator relationships at scale is still marketers’ biggest challenge

Around a third (33%) of U.K. marketers spend between £746,000 and £2.3 million per year on creator marketing, while 34% of U.S. marketers spend between $1 million and $3 million, annually, according to data from Billion Dollar Boy. Furthermore, 37% of U.S. marketers invest more than $3 million in creator marketing, compared to just 19% of U.K. marketers, per Billion Dollar Boy.

Still, the more cash they commit, there’s a lot more riding on it being a success.

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The long-running, often technical, debate over brand safety — once confined to ad tech insiders and programmatic buyers — has erupted into one of advertising’s most politically charged and high-stakes issues.

To underline this, it has now emerged at the center of a regulatory storm that could shape the fate of Madison Avenue’s largest-ever (proposed) merger: Omnicom’s proposed $13.5 billion acquisition of Interpublic Group.

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At this point, it’s clear that creators have become a line item in marketing budgets and media plans. What’s less clear, however, is the longevity and lifespan of a content creator in an ever-changing digital landscape. And that’s the space creators like Brandon Edelman are navigating right now.

“I’m super happy to forever be a TikToker, but who even knows if TikTok is going to be around next year,” Edelman said. 

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This story was first published by Digiday sibling Modern Retail.

Shopify is drawing a line in the sand on agentic AI — a type of bot that autonomously completes tasks on its own, without human inputs — with new language across merchant websites that appears aimed at blocking agentic AI systems. 

Shopify now includes a warning in the code that powers merchant storefronts, telling bots what they can and can’t do. The message appears in each site’s robots.txt file — a standard tool websites use to give instructions to automated crawlers like search engines. The new line states: “Automated scraping, ‘buy-for-me’ agents, or any end-to-end flow that completes payment without a final review step is not permitted.” The change was spotted over the last few days and appears across Shopify storefronts, including Alo Yoga, Allbirds and Brooklinen. The change is visible by appending /robots.txt to any merchant’s URL. 

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Despite years of pledges to diversify their ranks, major publishers are making barely perceptible progress, and in some cases — none at all. 

Overall, staff diversity at The New York Times, Hearst and Condé Nast has either marginally improved or stalled in 2024, according to their annual workforce diversity data this year. 

Lauren Winans, CEO of an HR consulting practice Next Level Benefits, said this means DEI efforts are moving in the right direction, “just not very quickly.” This slow but steady progress has been the case for years now.

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There was a time when landing on the first page of Google meant you were in business. Traffic followed, strategies scaled, and entire models were built on the back of those clicks.

That foundation is cracking. The era of “Google Zero” — industry shorthand for a world where Google keeps users inside its own walls — is here. At the center of it: AI Overviews. Years of SEO strategy are now colliding with a system dishes to answer, not refer. The result: for many publishers traffic is slowing — and in some cases falling off entirely.

Here’s where things stand. 

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The business of being a creator isn’t a solo show. They have become full-on productions.

In the two decades since YouTube’s debut, creators such as Smosh’s Ian Hecox as well as Mythical Entertainment’s Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal have helped to map out the path to becoming full-time creators. They have built out teams and eventually entire companies around themselves.

Now other creators like Dhar Mann and Savanah Moss are following suit by erecting what are effectively the new generation of Hollywood studios and production companies. Meanwhile, the likes of McLaughlin, Neal and Hecox are charting the next phases of the creator career trajectory, as covered in the video below.

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News UK, The Independent, and magazine publishers Immediate Media and Future are teaming up with retail media network Ocado to test clean room-powered data matching. 

The goal: to match Ocado’s shopper data with the publishers’ audience behavioral and contextual data and unlock more granular ad targeting for advertisers without giving up user control.

The move reflects a growing push by publishers to lean deeper into first-party data strategies and gain a foothold in the fast-expanding retail media space, where advertisers are eager for better targeting outside of the walled gardens. For Ocado the partnership provides valuable access to upper and mid-funnel data to inform its existing customer data. 

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AI platform wars are about to become the browser wars and advertising will be a key battleground.

Or at least it will be for two companies. 

OpenAI and Perplexity, two of the biggest players in alternative AI, are making browsers central to their next act. It’s a natural, albeit seminal, move for both companies — one that will have major implications for how advertising is sold, served and measured in an AI-first internet. 

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