Premium Pricing for Premium Content

Programmatic inventory – just say those words and in some circles, you can expect to cut CPMs in half (or worse). After contending with crappy long tail inventory, viewability issues, and fraud, it’s not surprising that advertisers want to pay less via programmatic channels. But they don’t have to. If you have premium inventory to sell on programmatic channels, you can command premium prices. And it’s entirely possible that 100% of your inventory is premium. But first, you need to make sure you’re calling a spade a spade. After working with many premium content publishers while at Operative, I’ve drawn some conclusions on what warrants premium pricing via programmatic: