We’re excited to share this feature from SIIA, the Software & Information Industry Association, which recently spotlighted ePublishing and how we’re helping publishers monetize their content. In the interview below, Kelli Chmielorz discusses our approach to turning content into sustainable revenue streams. If you’ve been following what we’ve been building, this is a great behind-the-scenes look at our thinking and where we’re headed.
This interview was originally published by SIIA (Software & Information Industry Association) on April 29, 2026. Read the original article here. Reprinted with permission.
Kelli Chmielorz, media tech company ePublishing’s vice president product, knows the current landscape well.
“What we’ve seen in the market is that Google has basically taken over the search world,” Chmielorz said. “They’re answering questions before folks can get to the brand site. Any publisher out there is going to tell you the same thing, whether it’s AI or whatever’s next. We’ve got to empower folks who are looking for things in a certain vertical to have a conversation with us.
“We need to let our members and subscribers come and have that simple conversation with our content, where we are the trusted source to come back and help them learn from our content to solve their business needs.”
At SIIA Media’s Revenue + Content Day coming up quickly on the morning of April 21 at the Yale Club in New York, you’ll hear a lot about this topic and what publishers are doing to surmount it and monetize those conversations. One of the key sessions will include Chmielorz’s boss, Tom Chaffee, founder and executive chairman of the two-decades-old ePublishing.
“Tom is passionate about publishing, but to be a little more specific, Tom is passionate about [people] making money in publishing,” she said. Chaffee will speak at the session Transitioning to GEO: Why You Need to do it and How it Works with Travis Hessman, VP of corporate content strategy, EndeavorB2B.
“Our topic should hit home for a lot of folks today—GEO (Generative Engine Optimization),” Hessman said on LinkedIn. “Why it’s becoming so essential to our industry, what it signals about our future, and how to use it to drive more impactful journalism and connections. If you’re thinking about how to adapt your content and SEO strategy for an AI-driven search landscape (and I really hope you are), you should probably go ahead and join us for the discussion.”
ePublishing has two big products right now: its Continuum DXP platform, “a CMS with a large ecosystem for publishers who not only want to create and curate content but also want to sell things,” Chmielorz said. “The Continuum platform enables publishers to do all the things that they need to do to—engage their audience and publish, but it also at its core is an ecommerce solution.”
It’s ePublishing’s other big product that gets her even more excited now. “About 16 months ago, we launched Ask My Brand, and it has been very successful. We’ve got it running for maybe 17-22 brands in that short amount of time, which is amazing in our world. There’s absolutely some secret sauce in it.”
Ask My Brand is an AI -search-based platform that facilitates conversations that visitors, subscribers, and members can have with that publisher’s content—with the ability to serve ads, power sponsorships, and drive subscriptions.
Chmielorz showed an example—BNP Media’s Food Safety Magazine. An Ask FSM Now box gives visitors the chance to interact through all of Food Safety’s content. When a question is asked, AI delivers the answer with an ad appearing above it. That ad has been delivering tremendous results for FSM.
“When somebody comes to Food Safety they want to know about good plastics to wrap stuff and assembly lines so the business problem that we’re solving is through that AI conversation,” she said. “It’s better than Google because you’re already the authority for that. That’s monetized with that product ad.
“You’ve got a lot of content. Let AI help you make it all relevant again and get it out on the site,” Chmielorz continued. “We focus on where AI can help these publishers. We learned a long time ago that AI is a team sport. You’ve got to have that model, whether you want to call it a hybrid or a must-have where AI and your engineering teams are a team. It’s called HITL, Human in the Loop. I don’t know if that’s a thing, but we’re making it a thing.
Chmielorz said that it empowers publishers to use AI in the ways that make sense for their business. “It’s what we deliver to the market, and then internally making sure that we adhere to good AI practices.”
Ask My Brand is a little different than just an AI search. Once ePublishing figured out it doesn’t have to go through OpenAI, they migrated it and the clients to a closed LLM so publishers know that this content is not being used by others.
“What’s most important is the benefit that publishers’ content is protected first and secondly,” Chmielorz said. “Only their content is used to reply to these prompts, and their audience is asking them, so it’s an intimate conversation. You’re a B2B publisher, and you’re the knowledge for that specific niche, whether it’s plumbing, architecture, food, or whatever.”
ePublishing is hearing that the ad inside the prompt of Ask My Brand gets three times the click-through of any other ad. “You could also link that ad to your subscriptions or new products,” Chmielorz said. “And each ad can be different depending on the question. It’s successful for publishers because it’s doing two things: satisfying their members, readers, and subscribers with that AI prompt answer; and it’s a place for them to make money.”
Personalizing that ad could come next. “We’re actually heading there,” she said. “It is essential for publishers to be in that AI game. Something like this makes them look modern. It also helps to drive deeper into the site into articles.”
Marketing and editorial teams can then come in and see what people are asking above and beyond just a topic. It might be food safety reports, so the editorial team, can then build more coverage around that.
“We are a very capable company again because we’ve adopted the AI as a team,” Chmielorz said. “We get a lot done.”
