Rate Card and Floor Policy for Direct Ad Sales

If your average direct deal closes at 55% of card, the card is fiction and your sellers already know it. We build cards where the achieved rate lands within about 15% of the published number, because the only rate that counts is the one the buyer pays, and a card nobody defends teaches every agency in the market to open at half. What the card is built from: Two years of closed deals with achieved rate by product, by advertiser and by agency. The programmatic clearing price for the same inventory, which is the real floor under any direct number, since no direct rate survives contact with a buyer who can see what the same impression costs on the open exchange. And sell-through by month, so scarcity gets priced where it exists and is not asserted where it does not. Three documents, not one: The card goes to agencies. The floor sheet never leaves the sales director. The discount approval ladder states who may grant what, a seller to a stated depth, the sales director below that, the publisher for anything past the floor, and it names the conditions that earn a discount instead of leaving it to whoever is in the room. Most of the revenue this work recovers comes from the third document. Agency commission and net pricing: Fifteen percent agency commission is the market standard here, and quoting gross where the buyer expects net is a recurring source of lost margin. The card states which it is, on the page. Volume tiers are kept structurally separate from the agency discount so that the two do not compound quietly across a year of bookings. Seasonality, priced as an index: A flat annual rate leaves money on the table in Ramadan and prices you out of the market in July. We build a calendar index instead: the Ramadan and Eid demand peak, the fourth-quarter run, the September return, and the Gulf summer trough when a large share of the audience is out of the region. Sellers get the multiplier and the dates, not a paragraph of guidance. Currency: Cards are issued in dirhams with a dollar equivalent alongside. The dirham has been pegged at 3.6725 to the dollar since 1997, so a cross-border deal needs no FX clause. A Saudi riyal line, if you sell into the Kingdom, is a different conversation and gets its own column rather than a conversion. Scarcity products: Takeovers, roadblocks and first-impression positions are priced by day against sell-through, never by impression volume. Anything genuinely scarce should be priced to be turned down sometimes. If it sells every time it is offered, it is underpriced, and we will say that at the review whether or not it is welcome. Not included: The packages themselves. Products have to exist and be sellable before they can be priced, and that is separate work we will do first if it has not been done. Selling. Contract templates and legal review. Programmatic floor configuration, which belongs to the stack engagement. What we refuse: A rate card with no deal data behind it. Rates for inventory that has never cleared at a measured price. And inflating card rates to leave room for a discount culture to operate, which is the most common version of this brief and the reason so many cards are ignored inside the building that produced them. Who this is not for: Publishers who want a benchmark of what competitors charge, when the number that matters is what your own buyers have paid. And sales teams with no authority to hold a floor, where the document changes nothing.