The Shifting Mindset of Publisher Leadership
"All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous, unpremeditated act without benefit of experience." – Henry Miller
Media tends to evolve through crises. New systems and cultural shifts arrive fast, and their full impact is often only clear in hindsight, after they’ve upended the status quo. Peak change often triggers widespread panic, driven by resistance to change, and that fear has been known to paralyze teams.
No longer. With 25 years of New Media behind us and the unstoppable force of AI reshaping traffic and workflows, plausible deniability is out the door. In the first half of 2024 alone, OpenAI’s GPT traffic surpassed 1.8 billion monthly visits globally【1】, while generative search tools like Perplexity and You.com are growing at over 30% month-over-month【2】—evidence of a shift in how audiences discover and consume content.
It’s been years since I’ve heard, “We’re in redesign and stuck in a code freeze for six months.” Today, testing new tools across a wide range of categories is a monthly (if not weekly) activity. And given that six months of AI advancement now brings changes equivalent to six years of legacy tooling, we simply don’t have time to pause.
Across independent and legacy publishing, leadership is finally converging with startup-think. As one top publisher CRO told me:
“We’ve positioned the org to take on more testing and exploration of new ideas.”
This shift is showing up in real demand. In Q2 2025, more than 90 percent of our publisher curation calls at Fastener generated four or more qualified intros—often mixing incumbents and startups—from an increasingly pioneering pool of 50+ clients helping publishers grow revenue, audience and efficiency.
What’s hot right now?
Dappier, a custom chatbot platform, enables publishers to own the Answer Layer in their vertical with display and keyword affiliate monetization —before Perplexity dominates the space - and to license content to the broader LLM ecosystem. LLMs now consume over 45 percent of digital publisher output in scraped or API-fed content【3】, so monetizing that via session time and LLM marketplaces is a strategic necessity.
Carbonatix’s text-to-speech solution is catching fire as 41 percent of adults in the U.S. now regularly listen to spoken-word audio—up from 18 percent a decade ago【4】, unlocking new reach and monetization opportunities along the way.
Supertab micropayments enable publishers to bring users into mindset of paying for content without asking too much too soon; by working with Google and Visa to get the economics right, publishers can enable time and other variable-based access to content that convert ~18% of those users into full subscribers; this is revenue, engagement and even supports ads and LTV..
Retention.com, once focused on ecommerce partnered with brands like Sportsman's Warehouse and Warby Parker, now converts the highest intent anonymous site visitors into engaged newsletter subscribers for over 100 publishers including The Blaze and Daily Wire. Crucial as owned audiences, especially email continues to outperform. Bigger lists equal; increased web traffic, programmatic ad revenues, newsletter sponsorship etc
Sovrn, long known for monetization, has re-engineered its Signal product to enrich publisher data with identity, media quality and commerce signals to improve outcomes marketers and yield for publishers
Meanwhile, M&A is Fastener’s second-largest line of business (after publisher development), reflecting how publishers are leaning into acquisition as a growth strategy. We're seeing increasing activity in buy-side diligence, tech integrations and custom buildouts—where MEV is becoming a favorite partner thanks to their competitive dev rates and roadmap-aligned builds.
Many of the leaders we speak to are already familiar with a portion of the intros we generate—but just as many are Henry Millering it:
“Tell me what’s new. I want to know what I’ve never seen or thought of. Make me uncomfortable.”
Discomfort is a natural state for sellers. It’s where growth lives. And now, more publishers are embracing it too. They’re recognizing that the solutions ecosystem is their meta-ICP: a living roadmap, constantly evolving to meet audience, revenue and operational goals at velocity.
That’s where the industry should be.
As we continue this series, we’ll dive into what’s happening across all four of our business units—PubDev, DemandDev, TalentDev and CorpDev (M&A buy and sell side) —sharing data and patterns from the field to help you calibrate, adapt, and grow into the new.
What do you think?
Let me know on LinkedIn or feel free to email me directly. I’d love to hear your POV.
SOURCES
Similarweb Traffic Stats: OpenAI.com, May–June 2024
Perplexity AI Growth: TechCrunch, Jan 2025; Similarweb
AI & LLM Content Consumption: Originality.ai, Feb 2025
Edison Research: Spoken Word Audio Report, 2024
Jason Greene is Head of Publisher Development & Product at Fastener, where he leads platform, editorial, and solutions matchmaking efforts. An executive team member since 2022, he helped launch LINK by Fastener and created The Hot Fix, now read by over 20,000 media professionals each month.
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