Publishers today face a complex and competitive environment. Low login rates continue to limit first-party data scale. Walled gardens still dominate ad spend and control access to rich, deterministic user data. Generative AI is reshaping how audiences discover and consume content, raising both opportunities and existential concerns. Meanwhile, retail media networks are emerging as powerful new players, leveraging their wealth of transactional and loyalty data to attract advertisers seeking addressable audiences.
Additionally, fragmentation across browsers, devices, and channels, makes it harder for publishers to recognize their audiences consistently. In this scattered landscape, they must work harder to prove the value of their audiences. Increasingly, that starts with choosing the right identity partner to ensure maximum addressability, while maintaining privacy and trust.
Below, we explore the key trends shaping the publisher landscape in 2025 and how the right identity foundation can make the difference between maintaining relevance and losing ground.
For most publishers, the push toward first-party data remains a work in progress. According to ID5’s State of Digital Identity Report, publishers with over 60% logged-in or registered audiences are still rare.
This stands in sharp contrast to retail media networks, whose logged-in, transaction-rich audiences have made them the new darlings of the ad industry. Retailers can offer advertisers reach, closed-loop measurement, and high-performing segments - advantages that web publishers struggle to match.
Yet this doesn’t mean traditional publishers are out of the game. The lesson from retail media is not just about having large volumes of data, but about making their audiences as addressable as possible, even without relying on logins. Identity solutions help publishers to activate every privacy-safe signal they have, increasing the proportion of inventory that can be meaningfully targeted. This helps them maintain the balance between privacy, monetization, and control, ultimately driving stronger CPMs.
By working with the right identity partner, publishers can extend their reach, enrich their audiences, and ensure that their inventory remains both visible and valuable, even without logins.
As signal loss accelerates, publishers increasingly rely on ID bridging to maintain programmatic performance. Adoption has surged, particularly following the introduction of the IAB Tech Lab’s ID Generation Provenance protocol, which has encouraged the standardization and validation of identifiers across the ecosystem. For publishers, effective ID bridging delivers tangible revenue benefits, such as driving higher fill rates and CPMs for previously unaddressable inventory, improving match rates with buy-side partners, and scaling the profitability of programmatic deals.
According to ID5’s research, 55% of respondents believe ID bridging has had a positive or very positive impact on advertising, and 51% of publishers are using one or more bridging partners.
As Heather Carver, Chief Revenue Officer at Freestar, puts it:
“Trust and transparency are critical. A lot of things can be passed in a bidstream, but is it being done in the right way? [The key is] making sure those are trusted signals and that the methodologies for creating these identifiers are done in a way everyone feels comfortable with.”
Trust is crucial. Bridging isn’t just about more connections — it’s about the right connections. Publishers should seek identity partners who adhere to transparent protocols, ensuring that data integrity is safeguarded and that buyer confidence and demand is strengthened.
As publishers strengthen their identity strategies, the next challenge is activation. Data on its own doesn’t drive revenue. It needs to be activated intelligently through curated marketplaces and direct data collaborations.
Curation has emerged as one of the most dynamic shifts in programmatic, allowing publishers and SSPs to package inventory and audiences around specific buyer needs. But the success of these curated deals depends heavily on the quality and connectivity of identity signals being sent downstream.
As Mike McNeeley, SVP of Product at Index Exchange, explains:
“We’re seeing a renewed interest in the signals available on the sell side. The supply side has a lot of data they can bring to transactions that make campaigns more effective for both parties. It’s about both sides coming together to make transactions more valuable for everyone.”
For publishers, this means working with an identity partner whose graph powers better signal sharing, enriching bid requests with reliable, privacy-compliant user data that improves match rates and campaign outcomes. The result is a more collaborative marketplace, where both sides can optimize performance and transparency around shared data.
Few forces have reshaped the digital ecosystem as quickly as artificial intelligence. Over the past year, it has surged across the adtech industry, reshaping how publishers, advertisers, and platforms use data and optimize campaigns.
Many publishers approach AI cautiously. Declining organic search traffic and the pressures of generative AI create uncertainty, and most are not utilizing AI to create editorial content. Instead, AI is being applied as a back-end tool for summarizing content, improving distribution, cataloging, and personalizing audiences.
Beyond these challenges, AI can significantly benefit publishers, especially when paired with strong identity frameworks. By leveraging privacy-first identifiers and enriched bidstream signals, AI can analyze massive datasets, uncover audience patterns, optimize campaigns, and support curated deals.
Babs Kehinde, Senior Director, Commerce Media – EMEA at PubMatic, explains:
“The ability to leverage AI as a tool rather than a crutch—to really help with core optimization—is key. The core insight that AI can bring to bear, with its ability to review massive data sets and pull out insights, frees publishers to use their time more efficiently, benefiting their clients.”
Here again, the right identity partner matters. Identity providers that use machine learning to strengthen connectivity, by matching IDs, modeling reach, and identifying cross-device relationships, can help publishers extract far more value from their data. AI used responsibly, and underpinned by privacy-first identity, can turn fragmentation into a foundation for smarter monetization.
The future for publishers will be defined not by the volume of their data, but by how effectively they activate it. Signal loss, privacy regulation, and market consolidation will continue to test media owners but those that adapt can still thrive.
The key is to build with partners who make adaptability possible: identity providers who can bridge signals across environments, support trusted data exchange, and use AI to improve addressability in a compliant way.
Publishers who take an adaptive approach to identity will stay competitive as addressability, privacy, and monetization continue to evolve.
To learn more about how ID5’s solutions help publishers to maximize addressability, visit id5.io/solutions.
