Can the Open Web Survive the Al Age? Kurt Donnell on Publisher Economics, Radical Transparency, and pubOS

<p>The open web has survived search, social media, programmatic advertising, privacy regulation, and the rise of the walled gardens. But does generative AI represent a fundamentally different threat?</p><p>In this episode of <strong>Signal &amp; Noise</strong>, Rio Longacre sits down one-on-one with <strong>Kurt Donnell, President &amp; CEO of Freestar</strong>, while Brett House is away.</p><p>Kurt brings an unusual perspective. He began his career as an M&amp;A attorney, moved into media and operations, helped take YogaWorks public, and eventually joined Freestar as its first CEO. Under his leadership, Freestar says it has grown sevenfold, expanded to 185 employees across 15 countries, and returned more than $1 billion to publishers.</p><p>Rio and Kurt tackle an increasingly urgent question for digital media: <strong>Is the publisher crisis still primarily a monetization problem, or has AI created a structural break in the economics of the open web?</strong></p><p>Kurt explains how the historical bargain between publishers and platforms is changing. Search engines consumed publisher content but also sent traffic back. AI answer engines can deliver the answer without the click. Larger publishers with strong brands, direct audiences, and genuine utility have generally held up better, while SEO-dependent long-tail publishers have faced greater pressure.</p><p>The conversation goes well beyond AI.</p><p>Rio and Kurt discuss why <strong>original journalism remains essential</strong> even in a world of podcasts, Substacks, creators, and AI summaries. Someone still has to produce the reporting—the raw material everyone else analyzes, summarizes, and synthesizes. Without a sustainable model for creating that information, the ecosystem suffers.</p><p>They also unpack the economics of programmatic: supply-path duplication, unnecessary intermediaries, declining trust, and why the open web remains harder for advertisers to understand than closed platforms. Kurt argues one of the walled gardens’ greatest advantages is <strong>simplicity and transparency</strong>—the ability to show advertisers what happens when they put money into the system.</p><p>Kurt also explains <strong>Freestar’s pubOS</strong>, a unified operating layer to help publishers manage header bidding, yield optimization, analytics, identity, integrations, demand partners, and managed services with less complexity.</p><p>Rio and Kurt explore:</p><ul><li><p>Why publishers need to become better marketer