Dynamic placement insertion: Unlocking hidden inventory with Relevant Digital’s Ronny Linder

BY ROB BEELER + RONNY LINDER, CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER AT RELEVANT DIGITAL

For years, publishers have been stuck with the same uncomfortable trade-off: grow ad revenue, or protect the reading experience. Adding placements has always felt like borrowing against the future, since more ads can mean a diluted property, distracting audiences and advertisers who quietly drift away. 

That tension has only sharpened as AI-generated search summaries eat into referral traffic, with some publishers reporting 50–90% lower click-through rates when an AI Overview appears. When every remaining session has to work harder, the pressure to find new inventory without spoiling the experience becomes acute.

Rob sat down with Ronny Linder, Chief Product Officer at Relevant Digital, to talk through the company’s answer to that problem: Dynamic Placement Insertion. It’s a feature that adds new placements automatically, based on rules the publisher sets, with particularly strong results on mobile web. In this conversation, Ronny explains why the old manual approach holds publishers back, why small screens still hold so much untapped potential, and how premium publishers can test whether there’s revenue on the table they haven’t yet reached.

Rob: Publishers have spent years trying to balance revenue growth with user experience. Why has creating new ad inventory traditionally been such a difficult trade-off?

Ronny: If you just spam new placements, you end up diluting the value of your property. Competing messages distract your audience, and the worst-case scenario is that advertisers see poorer outcomes and churn. One plus one doesn’t necessarily make two here; often it’s the opposite, more like 1.5. And of course, adtech is monitoring your performance and your ad-to-content ratio, so you might end up on the list of less valuable assets. Your audience might leave you, too, if the ad load gets too heavy, so we need to be mindful of this.

Rob: You’ve just launched Dynamic Placement Insertion. For publishers who haven’t seen it yet, what does it actually do, and what problem were you trying to solve when you built it?

Ronny: The challenge is automatically capitalizing on new inventory opportunities. Being able to create good-quality inventory easily is more important now than ever, because of the pressure publishers are facing from AI summaries. If there’s a chance to introduce additional placements, our platform will do it automatically. The best opportunities we see usually arise around longer articles in mobile browsers.

Rob: When you decided to build Dynamic Placement Insertion, what publisher workflow or pain point did you feel existing approaches weren’t solving well?

Ronny: Configuring placement structure for all possible user experiences manually is a hurdle. Of course, there are technologies out there helping with this and we definitely are not claiming that we are inventing the wheel here, but this kind of feature fits really well inside a solution like ours. Our core is Prebid, server-side and client-side, but we’ve always built features on top of that, and newly created inventory is available for all monetization partners, not just Prebid demand.

Rob: Many teams assume adding inventory means redesigning templates or involving the engineering team. How does changing that workflow change the way publishers think about optimization?

Ronny: This is the whole point of our approach. Manually configuring placement structure for every possible user experience is a hurdle, so now you can simply set rules for how and when to add new inventory, and once it’s set up, there’s no need for any manual adjustments.

Rob: You’ve seen particularly strong results on mobile. Why is mobile web such a good environment for this kind of approach?

Ronny: Audiences have been mainly mobile for years, and there are still plenty of untapped opportunities that don’t spoil the user experience. A small screen is a good place to capture attention, since there are fewer messages competing at once.

Rob: There’s always a point where adding another placement stops helping and starts hurting the experience. How should publishers think about finding that balance?

Ronny: Start by using your own site. If you think you might be ruining the user experience, you most likely are. Of course, the trend data from your analytics is valuable too, so you don’t have to rely on gut feeling alone.

Rob: You recommend A/B testing Dynamic Placement Insertion rather than simply turning it on everywhere. What should publishers actually be measuring to decide whether it’s working?

Ronny: Once it’s activated, you should be testing incremental revenue. In our industry, there are a lot of factors that are hard to measure, but this isn’t one of them. At the same time, it’s good to monitor user metrics like sessions and time spent with your content.

Rob: Reading through the documentation, it spends a surprising amount of time on spacing rules, layout growth and placement restrictions. Does that reflect a broader shift toward treating monetization and user experience as the same conversation rather than competing priorities?

Ronny: It reflects our clientele and our philosophy. We work with premium publishers who are constantly balancing user experience and revenue. And often that means subscription revenue as well as ad revenue. Granular control and transparency are what our customers appreciate, and that has been a cornerstone of our company since the beginning.

Rob: If a publisher believes they’ve already optimized their existing inventory, what’s the one question they should ask themselves before concluding there’s no more revenue to unlock?

Ronny: The data is usually available, but it can be hard for many publishers to see every screen-size and content-length combination, and the opportunities being lost across those variations. So the easiest approach is to set rules for Dynamic Placement Insertion and turn it on for a test sample. The uplift is easy to measure and so far, the outcomes have been really promising.

Ready to find your hidden inventory?

The trade-off publishers have wrestled with for years, protecting the experience while growing revenue, doesn’t have to be a trade-off at all. As Ronny makes clear, the untapped potential is often already there, hidden in the combinations of screen size and article length that are simply too numerous to map by hand. 

With AI summaries putting fresh pressure on every session, the publishers who thrive will be the ones squeezing genuine value from inventory they didn’t know they had, without ever making their audiences feel it. Dynamic Placement Insertion is built to find exactly that.

Ready to see how much revenue your existing traffic could be leaving on the table? Talk to the Relevant Digital team about testing Dynamic Placement Insertion on your own site.

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This is content created in paid partnership with Relevant Digital. We only feature partners who we believe bring real value to the publisher community.