Agency holding company Stagwell is acquiring publisher monetization network Freestar, it announced Monday.

The deal is the latest sign that media buyers are moving closer to publishers to shorten supply paths and get at the audience data they need to train AI agents.

The companies did not disclose the price, but the deal has closed. Needham & Company advised Freestar on the transaction.

Stagwell is acquiring Freestar's product offering and services, said Ben Berentson, CEO of Owned Media, the holdco’s division for its owned publishing and media properties.

Stagwell's global media business can now directly draw on inventory and data from Freestar's network of more than 1,000 publishers, which serve nearly a billion ad requests a day. That's a valuable asset for training The Media Machine, Stagwell's agentic operating system.

Berentson told AdExchanger that Stagwell is not acquiring the publishers in Freestar's network, just the tech they use to monetize and the existing client relationships. Stagwell will retain all of Freestar's employees and its executive leadership team.

Evolving to compete

The Freestar acquisition is the latest in a series of moves by Stagwell, which launched 11 years ago and has evolved rapidly because it "doesn't have this enormous legacy holding us back," Berentson said.

Just this year, Stagwell rolled out its own curation platform, Stagwell Curate; reorganized and rebranded its global media business as Stagwell Media; and brought The Media Machine to market.

Berentson said the Freestar deal is a continuation of Stagwell's mission to serve advertisers while delivering more working media spend to publishers.

Freestar's partnerships with premium news publishers, including the Associated Press, Reuters, Fortune and The Boston Globe, should help Stagwell advance its Future of News initiative to direct bigger media budgets to news orgs, Berentson said. Stagwell launched the initiative in 2024 to persuade advertisers that news is brand safe and effective.

But Stagwell also saw opportunity to work with Freestar publishers that fall outside its broader news monetization efforts, he said.

As examples, he pointed to Freestar clients Sports Reference (which includes Baseball Reference and other sports stats sites), Enthusiast Gaming (which operates online communities and wikis for video game IPs) and SignUpGenius (which manages web registrations, fundraisers and online ticket sales).

He added that Freestar's service also helps mid-tail and long-tail publishers connect with advertisers.

With Freestar, Stagwell can curate higher-fidelity audiences across these publisher properties than it could before, Berentson said. It can also use the Freestar network to add audience extension for wider media buys and to improve its own principal media buying strategy.

But, he stressed, it's up to advertisers to decide whether to include Freestar inventory in a campaign.

A more agile era

Stagwell also sees the Freestar acquisition as a way to shore up its own managed services strategy.

Berentson said publishers need to prepare for an agentic era in which agility and flexibility of data connections will be more important than owning sell-side ad tech.

While working with publishers, including Condé Nast, Vogue and Glamour, he said he saw firsthand how publishers can have mixed success with owned-and-operated technology. He expects more publishers to pursue the sort of managed monetization services that Freestar specializes in.

The acquisition won’t change much about Freestar's day-to-day operations, Kurt Donnell, Freestar's CEO, told AdExchanger.

But it does bring more resources for Freestar to invest in its pubOS monetization platform and product road map, he said. "Additionally, we’ll be able to provide new insights from Stagwell products like the Marketing Cloud," he added. "This gives us a better understanding of what really drives outcomes for both advertisers and publishers."

And as publishers face pressure from AI search cutting into their traffic and buyers consolidating spend into fewer channels, Donnell said, the only answer is to help generate better performance on both sides.

But publishers shouldn’t see much change in terms of how they work with Freestar. They’ll still get the same service they’ve always had, Donnell said.

"We’re keeping the same name, the same leadership, the same team and the same offerings," he said. "Publishers will keep working with the same account, yield and support people."

Although supply-path optimization is a priority for Stagwell, Berentson said, the holdco has no plans to micromanage Freestar's partnerships with DSPs, SSPs or other ad tech vendors.

Stagwell likes what Freestar is already doing, he said, and doesn’t want to mess with what’s working for publishers.

"We view ourselves as being an advocate for publishers," Berentson said. "This is an era of agility, and we believe that Freestar can arm publishers with that agility.