If your idea of updating your rate card is just tweaking last quarter’s numbers, you could be overlooking major opportunities—or worse, making costly mistakes.
James Deaker, aka “The Yield Doctor,” has the prescription for smarter pricing decisions. Produced in partnership with AdMonsters, this video guide is all about what publishers need to review before they even think about changing rates. He’s got plenty of great advice for pubs, no matter how frequently they update their rates.
Deaker outlines three critical areas to assess before you make any changes to your pricing model: shifts in demand, market conditions, and internal changes within your organization.
Demand shifts include whatever advertisers are asking for—for example, changes in creative formats or campaign types, or even fluctuations in advertiser or audience interest levels. Of course, these can have the most obvious effects on publisher pricing.
But publishers also have to weigh market forces and external trends that can impact ad sales and demand, like evolving privacy regulations (think Europe’s GDPR, California’s CCPA or Apple’s App Tracking Transparency). And macroeconomic shifts can upend pricing expectations overnight.
Meanwhile, internal organizational changes, such as a publisher tweaking its site layout or launching new ad formats, can dramatically affect the perceived value and performance of all of the publisher’s inventory.
To stay ahead of these various factors, Deaker emphasizes the need to stay plugged into real-world signals rather than relying on outdated assumptions.
Using firsthand examples from his time at Yahoo, Deaker demonstrates how direct engagement with sales teams and regular involvement in deal desk conversations enabled him to identify pricing shifts early. The takeaway? Data, not inertia, should drive rate card decisions.
Whether you update pricing monthly, quarterly, or annually, this video will help you step back and ask the right questions: What’s changed? Are we aligned with the market? Do we have the right inputs? Watch it now and make sure your next rate card update is rooted in strategy—not habit.