Category: Digital Yield 101

There’s something strange about the FTC’s allegations against Amazon Ads that I don’t think has received enough attention. Amazon told advertisers it was running a second-price auction. The FTC alleges that Amazon gradually changed the mechanics so that, much of the time, advertisers were effectively paying their own bid—the outcome you would expect from a […]

If you manager reaches out and says “We need to pull together next quarter’s rate card quickly.”, the biggest mistake yield and pricing managers make in this moment is jumping straight into the spreadsheet to tweak numbers based on the latest lost deal or a competitor’s recent press release. When you’re under the gun, you […]

If you ask an AI agent to build a pricing system, it will happily do so. The problem? It might build exactly what you asked for—and destroy massive amounts of value in the process. I’m seeing this happen across publishers, retail media networks, and ad tech platforms alike. To be clear, there are plenty of […]

Last week, I wrote about why calculating ad tech vendor costs requires real nuance rather than quick assumptions. Using my “Pirate Gold” analogy, the goal was simple: you have to look closely to trace where every coin actually goes before assuming it’s automatically being stolen. One sharp response called my argument “partial nonsense because the […]

Stop getting outraged about the “AdTech tax” before you’ve actually looked at what is going on under the hood. Every industry event seems to feature at least one presentation flashing a slide that shows less than 30% of an ad dollar making it to raw display inventory, immediately calling the rest a scam. But comparing […]

When digital ad sales demand softens, the corporate playbook usually follows a predictable, panicked script. The executive team looks for an immediate lever to pull, and eyes inevitably turn to pricing. But treating your core rate structure as a quick-fix mechanism introduces an asymmetric risk. You trade operational sanity and long-term value for a tiny, […]

AI fixes many things, but you still need human judgment to make sure that you are solving the right problems. In digital publishing, it’s incredibly tempting to hand the keys of inventory forecasting over to an algorithm and hope for the best. But an algorithm doesn’t understand your business strategy, your changing ad layouts, or […]

I just wrapped up at Programmatic.AI in Las Vegas. Special thanks to Lynne d Johnson and the rest of the AdExchanger team While the floor was buzzing about efficiency, there is a massive structural shift happening beneath our feet. Here are 3 realities I took away: 1. The Battle Over AI Scrapers and Content Value  […]

dCPM, or dynamic CPM, is one of the most widely used—and least consistently defined—terms in digital advertising. At a basic level, CPM (cost per mille) refers to the cost of buying 1,000 impressions. The “dynamic” in dCPM refers to the fact that, in modern programmatic environments, the price of an impression is not fixed. Instead, […]

In a previous video, I made a strong claim: sales compensation should align with profit. And in most cases, that’s still true. But over time—working across different companies, products, and market conditions—I’ve refined that view. The more complete principle is this:Sales incentives should align with the company’s true objectives—and with what the salesperson can actually […]