Author: Li Lu

Uncertainty continues for the media industry in 2025, but publishers are moving on from jumping on every trend — subscriptions, newsletters, paywalls — to bolster revenue. Now, they’re homing in on more thoughtful strategies, aiming to align their content with the smartest way to increase cashflow. As they do this, publishers’ revenue streams are slowly beginning to equalize, with their income spreading across channels.

Additionally, the U.S. presidential election last fall brought a healthy boost of traffic and new subscribers to publishers, and many publishers welcomed the “Trump bump” to help alleviate referral traffic challenges. Political news coverage and its related ad revenue has continued to be a boon for publishers well into the first quarter of 2025.

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Forget chatbots and prompt engineering — “agentic” is the latest AI buzzword to captivate and confuse marketers and media execs. 

In recent months, tech firms like OpenAI have emphasized AI agents and “agentic” applications of the technology in their mission to popularize generative AI adoption. The latest development comes courtesy of Adobe, which unveiled several AI agent tools last week at its Summit conference in Las Vegas, including a “foundation” agentic platform and 10 off-the-shelf AI agents.

Though the tech is clearly still in a larval stage, there’s real implications for brands, agencies and publishers relating to it. But in order to see through chatbots masquerading as something more, it’s important to understand the differences between agentic systems, AI agents and the various use cases already being applied at agencies, brands and publishers.

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