BLOG - 6 Questions With Nick Pataro of AdOrbit: Where Publisher Revenue Really Breaks
Email advertising is a niche world. The people who actually understand how ad revenue works, not in theory, but in practice, are a small group spread across platforms, publishers, and tools. We want to give them a place to talk.
This interview series is our way of doing that: short, focused conversations with people who live inside the problems publishers, advertisers, and newsletter operators are trying to solve.
First up is Nick Pataro, MD at Aysling, the company behind Ad Orbit. Nick works with publishers every day on the gap between how ad revenue is designed and how it actually gets executed. That’s exactly what we asked him about.
Meet the Expert
Nick Pataro is Managing Director at Ad Orbit, an ad revenue platform built specifically for media publishers. Ad Orbit covers the full contract-to-cash workflow: inventory management, order management, billing, and campaign reporting, all in one system. Originally designed for magazine publishers, the platform now serves omnichannel publishers selling across print, digital, newsletters, events, and sponsorships.
Nick has spent his career at the intersection of media operations and revenue strategy, and is a regular voice on the challenges publishers face as their product offerings, and the complexity behind them continue to grow.
On fragmentation, friction, and why newsletters keep getting skipped
From your perspective, what's the biggest operational problem publishers face today?
Complexity with less margin to hide it.
Revenue hasn’t disappeared, it’s just more fragmented. More channels. More custom deals. More pressure from advertisers. And at the same time, teams are leaner than they were five years ago. The problem isn’t selling ads (althought everyone always wants to sell more). It’s running a clean operation underneath all that complexity without burning people out or leaking money.
Is there a gap between how ad revenue is designed and how it's actually managed day to day?
Yeah, and it shows up right after a deal closes.
Sales designs these great integrated packages… think print, marketing services, newsletters, events. On paper it looks seamless. Then ops has to execute it across multiple tools. Billing has to confirm delivery before invoicing. Reporting lives somewhere else.
The vision is integrated. The execution is fragmented. That’s the gap.
Publisher ad ops are becoming more complex. Why don't generic ops systems work as well for publishers anymore?
Because publishers don’t sell widgets.
They sell inventory controlled promotions. Access to influence an audience. Campaigns that change mid-flight. Bundles that span channels. Most generic systems are built for stable SKUs and simple fulfillment. Advertising just isn’t that.
We see a lot of teams end up doing the real work in spreadsheets. That used to be tolerable. Today’s digital sprawl makes this a real drag.
Where do publishers lose the most time or revenue when sales, ops, and billing are spread across tools?
This stuff is hard to quantify.
Someone manually checking if what was sold matches what ran. Someone chasing down a billing discrepancy. Someone realizing a line item never got invoiced.
It’s not one big thing. It’s just constant friction & double entry.
What revenue opportunities open up when publishers run sales and ops in one system? And where do newsletters fit into that picture?
When everything lives together, sales drops the ball less (sorry salespeople).
They can bundle more confidently. They can see what’s available. They can use the system to remind them when renewals are approaching.
Newsletters have grown revenue for publishers tremendously over the past few years. Based on our trends data, they own the largest % increase in revenue by product category. You can find the full report here.
In a world where first-party audience matters more than ever, newsletters are one of the strongest assets publishers have. They just need to be operationally easy to sell.
How does a unified ad ops setup help publishers make smaller channels, like newsletters, commercially viable?
It lowers the effort required to sell them. For traditional publishers, newsletters can feel like “just one more product”, but this is the exact opposite of how successful publishers think.
If adding a newsletter placement means extra tracking, extra reporting, extra billing steps, reps skip it.
Newsletters and other smaller channels rarely fail because there’s no demand. They fail if they never get integrated properly into the solution mix (including the system where the selling/delivery/billing occurs).