Digital Advertising

The best of MDM in 2025

By Eric Benjamin Seufert

One aspect of the content creation process that I treasure is the opportunity at year-end to reflect on what worked and what didn’t. There’s an objective measure of content “working,” which is pageviews, although that metric is somewhat less clarifying now that the majority of the (new) content on this site is paywalled. But the pageviews metric can be used as guidance for what to produce going forward, and it’s particularly satisfying when the most-read articles of the year align closely with my own personal favorites.

Luckily, that happened in 2025 across two wholly distinct content themes:

  • Some of the more technical work that I’ve ever published here was popular, particularly Optimization models in digital advertising and Diffusion models for ad creative production. Both of those pieces were significant undertakings (I wrote the diffusion models piece over the course of a month), and I’m gratified to know that people enjoyed them.
  • My long-term, conceptual series, Google’s Gambit (parts one, two, and three) was also widely read (note that part one was published at the end of 2024). I enjoy following what I believe are high-impact concepts through episodic threads over time, and I hope to do more of that in 2026.

It goes without saying that some articles fared poorly in terms of pageviews, but I generally don’t regret those. What I’m more disappointed by are articles that did well but featured short shelf-lives in terms of relevance: anything related to tariffs in 2025 qualifies (see How will tariffs impact digital ad spend? and Digital advertising and tariffs: what can COVID explain?). While these pieces were conceptual in nature, they still came at the cost of writing things that might have better stood the test of time.

In terms of the site’s broader reach, I’m incredibly happy with the progress made in 2025. The number of paid subscribers increased by nearly 40% over the year, which I wouldn’t have expected at the end of 2024, given the niche nature of this blog. And I made the decision in the year to do something I had been nervous about: to distribute each post to subscribers by email. These two things are not independent: email distribution had been requested by a number of people, and it likely improved the retention of paying users. But it also led to my work being shared more readily with non-subscribers through email forwarding. I was concerned that this might cannibalize new subscriptions, but I believe the opposite actually happened: it exposed my work to people who simply were previously unaware of it.

Below, I present the 10 most popular articles and podcasts published on Mobile Dev Memo in 2025.

Most Popular Articles

  1. Obviously, OpenAI will monetize with ads
  2. YouTube, the CTV behemoth
  3. Could ATT be rolled back?
  4. Google was the open web’s imperfect benefactor
  5. Google’s gambit, part 2
  6. Affiliate links, personalized ads, and chatbot revenue optimization
  7. The privacy shuffle, part 2
  8. Tim Cook chose poorly
  9. Agentic commerce is a mirage
  10. Google’s Gambit, Part 3: Consumers embrace AI Mode

Most Popular Podcast Episodes

  1. Meta’s Renaissance
  2. Spotify’s down-funnel advertising ambitions (with Lee Brown and Per Sandell)
  3. Marketing experiments and probabilistic measurement (with Koen Pauwels and Julian Runge)
  4. The headwinds facing agentic commerce (with Andrew Lipsman)
  5. Unpacking Customer Lifetime Value (with Daniel McCarthy)
  6. Google’s Gambit and the future of the open web
  7. Advertising measurement in an uncertain economy (with Olivia Kory)
  8. Heidegger’s caution
  9. Podcast: What is signal engineering? (with Itai Kafri)
  10. Commerce at the limit

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