Salon is a long-standing digital-first publication, attracting over 10 million unique monthly visitors, predominantly from the United States. Known for its incisive political commentary, Salon covers a wide range of topics, including culture, technology, and lifestyle

Since 1995, Salon has monetized its content through digital advertising, maintaining a sustainable revenue model in a highly competitive industry.

AdTech Stack Overview:

The Challenge

In its effort to protect inventory value, Salon experimented with setting manual price floors based on historical data. However, these price floors were not optimized to adjust in real-time to fluctuating demand, causing inefficiencies in revenue generation.

Without the ability to set dynamic floors, the publisher risked underselling valuable ad space. Based on the average uplift Miles AI Dynamic flooring has delivered in the past , this opportunity cost was significant.

Illustrative Opportunity Cost:

RPM uplift ($0.17) × ad opportunities (50 million) × 12 months = $100,000+**

** figures are not indicative of publisher data

To address this, they sought a comprehensive flooring solution that could react to fluctuating demand and secure the highest bids in each auction.

The Solution: Mile’s AI Dynamic Flooring

To resolve these challenges, Salon integrated Mile’s AI Dynamic Flooring into its AdTech stack, focusing on delivering real-time adjustments to floor pricing and enhancing revenue potential.

Data-Driven Floor Pricing
Mile’s machine learning model was trained on Salon’s historical and real-time auction data for two weeks. This phase provided the groundwork for an adaptive pricing system that could dynamically respond to market demand.

Market-Responsive Floor Pricing
Mile’s AI Dynamic Flooring continuously adjusted price floors based on real-time data, ensuring that Salon captured the highest possible bids from advertisers. 

Comprehensive Revenue Analytics
Mile’s custom dashboards provided Salon with deep insights into bidder performance, auction health, and revenue attribution. The dashboard tracked parameters such as page URL, author, layout, referrer, and UTM, allowing Salon to make more informed decisions about their pricing strategies.

Prebid Impact

• Prebid CPM lift: $0.20
• Prebid RPM lift: $0.07

*skipped refers to control group 

By optimizing floor prices in real time, Mile’s solution helped Salon capture higher bids from Prebid advertisers.

Google Ad Exchange Impact

• Google CPM lift: $0.25
• Google RPM lift: $0.10

*skipped refers to control group 

Mile’s AI dynamic flooring didn’t just boost Prebid performance; it also had a significant impact Google Ad Exchange performance. As Prebid floor prices increased, Google had to raise its bids to remain competitive. This led to a notable uplift in RPMs and CPMs from Google Ad Exchange, further enhancing the publisher's overall ad revenue.

Total Revenue Impact

Using Mile’s Revenue Analytics Dashboard, Salon evaluated the overall impact of AI Dynamic Flooring. The data indicated an overall increase of $100,000+ in ad revenue annually. 

Salon saw improvements across Prebid and Google Ad Exchange, resulting in:

• Total RPM lift: $0.17
• Total CPM lift: $0.20

These results reflect an effective optimization strategy that allowed Salon to better align floor pricing with current market demand.

Protect your Inventory and Maximize Revenue

Mile’s AI Dynamic Flooring helped Salon achieve a floor pricing strategy, leading to improved performance in both Prebid and Google Ad Exchange auctions. With the additional insights provided by Mile’s Revenue Analytics Dashboard, Salon can continue optimizing its programmatic advertising and maximizing its inventory value.