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Yield Stories - Sell Out The Homepage! · The Yield Doctor with James Deaker

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  Hi, I'm James Deika, the yield doctor. I
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  help publishers and platforms get more
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  value for their ad inventory by making
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  smarter yield decisions. Today's story
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  is about a time I was under pressure to
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  sell out every day and what happened
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  when we actually did. I was working at a
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  major online publisher and the homepage
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  inventory was incredibly high value,
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  high traffic, premium placement, strong
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  brand alignment. And one day the CEO
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  told me, "Make sure the homepage is sold
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  out every day." It wasn't said as a
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  threat, but I understood the subtext. We
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  needed to hit the targets, and if we
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  didn't, there might be consequences.
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  maybe even for me
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  personally. So, let's think about that
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  from the CEO's perspective. From their
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  perspective, it made sense. If something
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  sells out consistently, it signals high
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  demand. Think Taylor Swift tickets, the
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  Super Bowl. Scarcity makes things look
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  hot. But digital inventory doesn't
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  always work that way. And the problem is
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  you can't fake scarcity when everybody
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  knows exactly how many homepage days
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  there are available in a given quarter.
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  And worse, the price that you need to
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  sell out is very different than the
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  price that you might actually set to
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  maximize revenue. So I was stuck in this
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  problem between the perception of value
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  and the reality of yield. So, I found a
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  middle ground. I lowered the homepage
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  price enough to drive more volume. I
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  approved most reasonable exception
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  requests, and I made sure that the sales
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  team was aligned around the same sell
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  through goals, and we went all in. That
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  quarter, we sold more homepage ads than
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  any other quarter in the company's
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  history. The revenue was incredibly
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  solid, but we didn't create lasting
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  demand. We just conditioned the market
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  to expect cheaper access. And the
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  following quarter, sell through demand
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  dropped. Pricing say stayed soft. We had
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  trained the buyers to to wait for the
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  discount. So, what is the lesson here?
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  Again, make sure that you're optimizing
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  for the right goal. In yield management,
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  you want to maximize revenue, not fill
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  rate, not CPM, not any single metric.
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  And misaligned goals can look like
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  short-term wins, but can create
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  long-term
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  damage. So, a bit more context for those
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  wondering why I didn't push back harder
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  on the CEO's request. The reason was I
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  had a backstop solution in place that
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  gave me some degree of comfort. We were
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  in the middle of transitioning our ad
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  serving systems from a fully managed
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  sales team into a programmatic
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  environment. And so I had some
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  confidence that we could recover the
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  pricing pressure once the new systems
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  were in
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  place. I hope you found this content
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  useful and valuable. If you want to make
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  better decisions about how to price and
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  package your inventory, make sure to
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  follow along. I've got plenty more
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  stories like this one. I'm James Deika,
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  the yield doctor. Thanks for watching.