Why publishers are pushing for a Publisher Coalition

• Publishers are “caught between the need for strong user retention and the commercial pressure to fill inventory at higher CPMs”.
• Publishers can be penalised based on IVT data they cannot see or independently verify.
• The proposed Publisher Coalition would give publishers “a seat at the table” when industry standards are written.

Charlie Castell is founder and CEO at PubRev+. 

MAU Vegas is the kind of event where the most interesting conversations don’t always happen on stage. They happen in the hallways, over coffee and at the end of long evenings when people stop being careful about what they say.

This year, one theme kept coming up in those conversations more than any other: publishers are under pressure, while the tools meant to protect the ecosystem are making things worse and nobody seems to want to say it out loud.

I didn’t want to just say it. I wanted to do something about it. So when I took to the stage at MAU Vegas 2026. I laid out what I've come to call the Steps to Recovery, including the idea of a Publisher Coalition to give the supply side a stronger voice in shaping industry standards. I did so not because I have all the answers, but because I think the industry is finally ready to stop avoiding the conversation. 

The four problems nobody is naming clearly enough

The mobile advertising industry has spent years building frameworks, standards and verification systems that were meant to make everything cleaner, fairer and more efficient. But for publishers, the reality has looked quite different.

The first problem is ad quality. What is happening right now is an arms race, and it is affecting everyone from independent publishers to the ad networks and SSPs that serve them. 

Publishers are caught between the need for strong user retention and the commercial pressure to fill inventory at higher CPMs, where performance ads will always bring them higher ARPDAU than brand ads. 

Ad networks are under pressure to win more budgets than their competitors, which means more screens without ‘x’ buttons. The result is a terrible experience for users, more churn in the industry, and the in-app ecosystem losing trust from all players.

The second problem is IVT transparency. The verification frameworks that exist in mobile are operated by companies with commercial interests in the outcomes they produce.

Publishers are being flagged and penalised on the basis of data they cannot see, produced by methodologies they had no hand in writing. There is no independent way to verify whether any of it is accurate. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, as the saying goes. Who is watching the watchmen?

The third problem is broken solutions. The fixes currently being offered to publishers are too often funded by the same demand-side platforms and verification companies that created the problems in the first place. It’s a bit like asking the banks that caused the 2008 financial crisis to write the regulations that would govern them afterwards.

The fourth problem is unilateral standards. Publishers are operating in an environment where the rules can change without notice, penalties arrive without explanation and there is no established process that allows them to push back. The standards exist, but they are not built with the supply side in mind.

These aren’t just niche adtech concerns. Every mobile game developer relying on ad monetisation is affected, and every player inside a mobile game also feels the consequences when ad quality deteriorates. The supply chain that keeps mobile gaming funded runs through publishers, and that supply chain is currently under serious strain.

The steps to recovery

Naming the problem is the first step, which is why I called it exactly that: admit we have a problem. Not to point fingers, but as a starting point. The patterns the industry has normalised are not sustainable, and with AI accelerating everything, the window for fixing the foundations is narrowing fast.

The second step is to organise and take collective action. This includes working with independent organisations to have a real voice when standards are being written, calling on the IAB to coordinate, backing open-source solutions like BidOn, and building a Publisher Coalition that can properly represent the supply side.

The third step is the one that excites me the most, because it is the one that publishers have the least experience with: take back your power. Publishers often forget that it is their inventory, and they decide where it is sold.

They have the ability to demand transparent data from adtech companies, to hold SSPs and DSPs to transparency standards and to stop reacting to unfair penalties and start setting the agenda alongside the demand side. Publishers have more leverage than they realise, and it is time they used it.

The fourth step is making a promise. Acknowledge the problem publicly, commit to being part of fixing it and sign a pledge. In an industry where nobody wants to be the first to say that something is broken, having names behind the effort goes a long way.

The case for a Publisher Coalition

Getting publishers to act collectively is no easy feat. The fear of upsetting commercial partners runs deep in this industry, and it’s hard to sustain momentum when everyone is also competing with each other. But the conversations at MAU this year felt different.

The Publisher Coalition is a publisher-led initiative designed to give the supply side a seat at the table when industry standards are being written. Its goal is to bring together publishers, SSPs and industry bodies, including the IAB, to establish independent IVT monitoring, fairer verification frameworks and clear, enforceable standards built with publisher input.

There is a growing appetite for this among publishers, SSPs and even some buyers, and the people who are tired of the current dynamic are no longer a minority. The Publisher Coalition aims to be the structure that gives them somewhere to take their frustrations constructively.

What this means for developers and studios

If you are building mobile games and relying on ad revenue to fund your work, these issues are your issues too. Players don’t realise the ad network is the one serving the bad ad. They take their frustration out on the developer or publisher. At best, they delete the app; at worst, they leave a terrible review.

When ad quality deteriorates across the ecosystem, it’s your retention numbers that take the hit and your reviews that mention intrusive ads, which hurts your install rate and increases your CPI.

When publishers lose revenue, the ad experiences inside games have to get worse (as they run more high CPM performance ads), retention suffers, lifetime value drops and the metrics that matter most for your business are downstream of a supply chain that isn’t working as well as it should.

2026 feels like a moment of change. The industry is finally starting to speak up about the problems it has been brushing under the rug. Publishers are starting to understand that they have more power than the current dynamic suggests, and there are practical things they can do to be part of shifting it.

To find out more about Publisher Coalition and how to get involved, or if you want to have this conversation directly, connect with me on LinkedIn.