The Unglamorous Work Behind Every Publisher That Monetizes Its Audience

AI is rewriting how buyers find information — again. What separates the publishers who’ll thrive isn’t the flashiest technology. It’s three unglamorous data foundations.

The ground under audience-driven businesses is moving. Google’s organic search traffic to publishers fell by roughly a third worldwide in the year to November 2025 — and closer to 38% in the U.S. AI assistants are starting to answer the questions your audience used to type into a search bar, and while they send back only a sliver of referral traffic today, the direction is unmistakable. Add rising acquisition costs and longer buying cycles, and it’s no wonder most teams feel they’re being asked to do more with less.

At OX9, Rebecca Kitchens — who started as a sales rep at TechTarget in 2002 and left last year as its president, having helped build it into a $500M public company — offered a steadying reframe. She’s watched this movie before. When she dug up TechTarget’s original 1998 business thesis, she found it “could have been written today.” The internet reordered how buyers found information and, with it, the whole economics of buying and selling. AI is doing the same thing. As she put it, borrowing a line she loves: “When you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck.” Every leap forward creates new problems — and new openings.

In both eras, the winners weren’t decided by who had the shiniest new technology — and there’s no shortage of spending on technology. Advertisers now pour roughly a fifth of their marketing budgets into martech that keeps getting more sophisticated without necessarily getting more effective. The winners were decided by who did the unglamorous work underneath the tools. Rebecca calls these the critical data hallmarks — and if you haven’t invested in them, she warns, you’ll struggle to monetize your audience in the ways the next era will reward.

First, remember what the job is

Before the foundations, a reframe on the work itself. Media companies serve two groups we tend to label “audience” and “advertisers.” Rebecca’s push: stop. They’re buyers and sellers, and your job has always been to bridge them. Serve the buyer with authoritative, unbiased insight and you earn the trust that lets you command a premium from the seller.

That’s why “buyer education starts at the click.” Three hundred people attending your webinar isn’t success; it’s interest. What they learn there is what decides whether they buy. Which makes your content, and the behavior of your audience against it, far more valuable than a content library. It’s “a treasure map for who your advertisers want to go after.”

The trouble is, most publishers can’t read their own map. Only 9% of media organizations say they use audience data extremely effectively to inform action. The data exists. The ability to act on it doesn’t. That gap is exactly what the three hallmarks close.

Hallmark 1: One profile per person

The first is the least exciting and the most important: a single, unified view of every person you serve. Not a row in one system and a different row in another — one profile that consolidates who someone is across email, web behavior, purchases, events, and subscriptions.

At TechTarget, Rebecca’s team built one central database and a single view of the user from the start — they knew John Smith from Judy Clark. Because they sold into B2B, they also triangulated each person back to their company through domain normalization, so account-based campaigns actually held together. The lesson generalizes well beyond B2B: if your growth comes from multiple brands or from acquiring smaller ones, disparate data quietly caps how much any single advertiser can spend across your portfolio. Consolidate the profile — even if you’re not yet sure how you’ll use it — because you can’t monetize what you can’t see as one person.

Hallmark 2: A taxonomy that understands meaning, not keywords

The second is the one Rebecca cheerfully admits makes her a geek: taxonomy. Not a tag list — a clean, consistent way of describing what your content is actually about. Its “aboutness,” not just which keywords happen to appear.

Her team tagged content two or three levels deep, so they could tell an article about cloud and security from one about cloud and management — a distinction that changes everything when you’re matching advertiser demand to audience interest. And the best source for that taxonomy isn’t a vendor; it’s your editors. As Rebecca put it, if your editors can’t name the top topics in your market, what exactly are they covering?

What’s new is the ability to do this at scale. The hand-tagging era is over; AI can now apply a rigorous taxonomy across everything you publish — provided you’ve defined what “rigorous” means. One more move she recommends: put your advertisers’ commercial targets into that same taxonomy, so a rep can walk into a sales conversation already knowing which ten accounts should be spending with you, backed by the audience data to prove it.

Hallmark 3: Analytics that turn into revenue, not dashboards

The third is where most publishers stop one step short. Plenty of teams have the performance metrics. Far fewer turn that insight into revenue. Dashboards are common; converting them into commercial opportunities is rare.

Close that gap and you can target the audiences that yield the most, match advertiser interest to audience interest, reduce fatigue on your file, and turn analytics into commercial benefit rather than a monthly report nobody acts on. This is also where “delivering leads” stops being enough. Rebecca’s analogy: at an event, you want sponsors to re-sign at the show, on the strength of how it felt — not to go back to the office, try to prove ROI, and only then decide. Digital lead gen leaves you in the worse position. You handed over the leads and the clicks, and you don’t know what happened next. So advertisers prove ROI on their own, and if they can’t attribute the win to you, they spend their next dollar somewhere else.

The fix isn’t only better data — it’s helping advertisers recognize the value you delivered. Sometimes that’s deep: TechTarget connected directly into advertisers’ CRMs and sales tools to show its leads converted faster. Often it’s simpler: “You told me these were your three ICP targets. Look at the logos I delivered. Aren’t these exactly the people you wanted?” Done at scale, that’s how you own the narrative of your own value — even when perfect attribution isn’t possible.

What the foundations unlock: becoming the trusted voice

Here’s the payoff, and it’s timely. AI is producing a winner-takes-most dynamic in whose content gets surfaced. A small set of domains already commands the lion’s share of citations in AI answers — Reddit and LinkedIn alone account for more than a fifth of them. One is an unvetted peer forum; the other is mostly marketers. Neither is the deeply sourced, practitioner-grade authority your market needs.

Meanwhile, buyers are leaning on AI before they’re fully equipped to judge it. In a 2026 survey of technical buyers, trust in generative AI sat at just 4.7 out of 10 — yet 69% already use it in the purchasing process. Younger buyers reach for it fastest, often without the experience to tell a good answer from a confident-sounding wrong one. Rebecca’s point: that’s not a threat to the information business. It’s the opening of a generation. Someone in every market will become the trusted voice these tools and buyers rely on. “Why not you?”

That’s what the hallmarks make possible. Rebecca likes the AI-art parable: when a Midwest artist won a contest with an AI-generated piece, the outrage missed the interesting part — he’d run the prompt some 2,500 times, steering it with real art-history knowledge. “Like an artist who gets trained in all the greats, AI also needs to be trained by masters of the field.” Your data, your taxonomy, your editors’ expertise — that’s what grounds the AI experiences in your market. It’s a currency, and most of it is sitting unspent.

Spend it well and there’s real upside on the table: first-party audience relationships still command a premium, with private-marketplace deals clearing at roughly twice open-exchange rates. The relationship you have with your audience is the one thing that can’t be commoditized — so don’t let it be.

The job won’t change — even if everything else does

The next era of demand will be won, Rebecca argues, by whoever best engages the buyers in a market and, in doing so, attracts the sellers who want to reach them. Simple to say, hard to do — and impossible without the foundations underneath it. The technology will keep changing. The job won’t: bridge the gap, serve the buyer, and earn the right to be the voice a market trusts. The publishers investing in these data hallmarks now are the ones who’ll still be standing when the dust settles.

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