Compliance
The market's recipe against falling CPMs, and what it leaves out
Programmatic Spain published the list of strategies the market recommends to publishers facing falling open-market CPMs and shrinking search traffic: prioritise curated inventory, PMPs and programmatic guaranteed; ask for user registration with little friction; optimise ARPU and lifetime value; cut commodity inventory and apply throttling; use performance-based dynamic refresh; and strengthen the sales team.
Worth recording what the piece does not carry: a single number. It does not quantify the CPM decline or the traffic decline, does not identify the source of the recommendations and names no executive. It does mention a two-to-three-year horizon for the impact of agentic advertising and generative AI. It is a reading of direction, not a measurement, and should be used as such.
The list is sound and almost entirely on the demand and data side: the rules for buyers change, what you ask of the reader changes, and how you measure changes. Almost all of it requires a team, a registered user base, or negotiating leverage with large buyers. That is precisely what a mid-size publisher has least of.
Our reading: the list is missing what you can do alone next week. Curation improves the price of an auction that still happens in the same places on the page. Before competing harder for existing space, it is worth asking how many spaces the page still does not have — the only lever that depends on convincing nobody.
Sources and reading
Programmatic Spain: los publishers refuerzan sus estrategias para 2026