pubad · designs · Editorial

Issue 01 · Spring 2026

Plain-English ad-tech
for independent publishers

Honest writing about monetization, ad quality, and the AI-era traffic squeeze — from people who actually read the spec PDFs so you don't have to.

The small-publisher RPM survey nobody's run

Three ad networks, five verticals, 240 anonymized publishers. Here's what real RPMs look like outside the case-study slide.

The CPM/RPM calculators that rank in Google today are AdSense farms. They quote a number — usually around $5 — and let you plug in pageviews. None publish their methodology. None segment by niche. None update.

We sent a one-question form to a dozen ad-ops Slacks and publisher Discord servers ...