marketingdemand generation
How Freestar and Audigent are Powering Future-Proof Publisher Demand
1. What prompted your team to explore curation and evolve your approach to data management in the first place?
Before joining Freestar, I spent nearly a decade on the SSP side at Magnite, working closely with the demand facilitation team to connect publisher supply with buyer demand and layer decisioning directly on the sell side. Back then, “curation” wasn’t widely discussed, but it was already clear how powerful it could be when supply partners intelligently packaged inventory based on quality, audience, and performance.
When I joined Freestar, I wanted to bring that same philosophy to our publishers. We started by analyzing which curated deals Freestar was included in and, more importantly, which signals - contextual, engagement, and audience - were consistently driving stronger results. Working closely with our demand and SSP partners, we found that curated deals delivered 2X+ higher CPMs than open auction traffic. Buyers were willing to pay more when inventory was clearly signaled and structured in a way that reflected its quality and performance potential.
As Andrew Casale, CEO of Index Exchange, has said, “Sell-side decisioning is about giving publishers control to decide which path and which buyer is best for each impression — not leaving that choice entirely to the buy side.” That philosophy aligns perfectly with Freestar’s approach. Curation allows us to embed that control and intelligence into how inventory is surfaced, ensuring it’s properly valued in a more data-driven, privacy-conscious ecosystem.
Today, more than 30% of Freestar’s supply is connected to curated deals, delivering higher CPMs, improved transparency, and stronger, more direct relationships with demand partners. At the end of the day, our job is simple: to ensure every impression is properly signaled, packaged, and positioned to maximize publisher yield. Curation has become one of the most effective levers to make that happen.
2. The case study highlights a shift from DMPs as cost centers to revenue drivers. How do you see the role of the DMP evolving?
Historically, DMPs were expensive, and only publishers with large, dedicated sales teams could easily recoup the investment. They were powerful tools, but often inaccessible to most publishers who didn’t have the scale or resources to activate their data directly with buyers.
That dynamic has changed. Through our partnership with Audigent, the DMP has evolved from a passive data repository into an active revenue amplifier and strategic intelligence layer. Together, we use Audigent’s curation-led DMP to better understand and model Freestar’s audience signals, and we lean on their deep demand-side expertise to help sell the value of those audiences and optimize toward buyer outcomes.
But the benefits extend well beyond monetization. Freestar’s Audience Development team also uses the Audigent DMP to provide our publishers with actionable insights into their users and content performance, helping them better understand who their audiences are, how they engage, and what topics or formats drive the most value. Those insights feed directly into editorial, content, and traffic strategies, closing the loop between audience growth and revenue optimization.
In the past, buyers relied heavily on their own data and third-party segments, leaving publishers in the dark about what was being layered onto their inventory. Today, the pendulum has swung back and publishers now have deeper, more accurate insight into their audiences than anyone else, far surpassing the commoditized third-party data sets that often lack precision and reliability. With the right technology and the right partnerships, they can intelligently curate and package those audiences to meet advertiser goals directly.
For Freestar, this collaboration has been transformative. By combining our network’s first-party insights, Audigent’s deal-activation capabilities, and our Audience Development team’s analytics expertise, we’re helping publishers not only drive higher yield, but also build stronger, data-informed relationships with their readers. The modern DMP isn’t just about data storage; it’s about collaboration, intelligence, and creating the cleanest, most valuable path between audience understanding and buyer demand.
3. What made Audigent’s technology, particularly its curation-led DMP and Hadron ID, stand out as the right fit for Freestar’s ecosystem?
Audigent stood out because they didn’t just offer a DMP, they reimagined what a DMP could be in a post-cookie, privacy-first world. Their curation-led approach, powered by the Hadron ID, aligns perfectly with Freestar’s mission to deliver quality, transparency, and efficiency across the supply path.
As Drew Stein, CEO of Audigent, explained, “With third-party cookies on the road to nowhere, we built a framework that takes different kinds of identifiers — audience-based, contextual, deterministic, and probabilistic — and creates an encrypted, encoded, and compressed shorthand.” That approach deeply resonated with us, because it mirrored the privacy-conscious, data-intelligent infrastructure we’ve built within Freestar.
What truly made this partnership work is Audigent’s dual strength: deep expertise in audience data and strong buyer-side relationships. They understand how to enrich and model publisher data while also knowing what drives performance and ROI for advertisers. As our joint announcement noted, “Publishers have incredible data at their fingertips, but it’s often difficult for them to package it in a way advertisers can utilize. When publisher partners like Freestar integrate with innovative technology providers like Audigent, it unlocks new opportunities for nearly everyone in the ecosystem.”
That’s exactly what we’ve seen. The partnership allows us to scale our audience data strategy across more than 500 publishers, making their inventory more discoverable and valuable, all without additional lift on their end. The combination of Audigent’s curation architecture with Freestar’s publisher-first wrapper creates buyer-ready, privacy-safe packages that amplify yield and drive better outcomes across the open internet.
4. How did you ensure the solution worked across Freestar’s diverse publisher portfolio? What results have been most exciting?
One of Freestar’s greatest strengths is the diversity of our publisher network, from hyper-niche communities to major media brands. The beauty of our partnership with Audigent is that it scales effortlessly across that spectrum. Every publisher has an audience, and through this collaboration, we’re helping them unlock the full value of that audience in a seamless, scalable way.
By integrating Audigent’s DMP and curation technology directly into Freestar’s header infrastructure, we can activate data and deliver curated deal access across all publishers, with no additional lift required on their end. It’s all about signal integrity: ensuring buyers consistently receive high-quality, structured audience and contextual signals, regardless of the publisher’s size or technical maturity.
The results have been consistent and meaningful. Audigent’s framework has driven incremental revenue and higher RPMs across the board, allowing every publisher, large or small, to benefit from sophisticated, data-enhanced monetization strategies. This collaboration underscores a simple truth: when signaling is strong and partnerships are aligned, every publisher can compete – and win – in a data-driven marketplace.
5. How do you see curation, data collaboration, and identity shaping the open internet in 2026 and beyond?
The next chapter of the open internet will be driven by collaboration and quality. As curation, data collaboration, and identity converge, the leaders will be those who can connect quality inventory, trusted data, and transparent activation into cohesive, outcome-based buying experiences.
We see a future where publishers, not platforms, define audience value. Curation and interoperable IDs like Hadron make publisher data portable, measurable, and tradeable in real time, allowing them to participate more directly in how audiences are valued and transacted. For Freestar, that means continuing to invest in partnerships that reinforce trust, transparency, and sustainability, ensuring every dollar spent on the open web delivers performance for advertisers and long-term value for publishers.
Looking ahead, we’re also preparing our publishers for the next evolution: agentic buying. As AI-driven agents like AdCP begin to make autonomous buying and curation decisions, our focus is on ensuring publishers are well-positioned to capture spend as these systems seek out the most transparent, signal-rich, and high-quality inventory paths.
Ultimately, this is a natural extension of Freestar’s core mission: to keep publishers ahead of the curve by building the technology, intelligence, and partnerships that make the open internet work better for everyone.
