Selling advertising has always worked on a transactional basis where publishers need to compete and win business on a deal by deal basis.  Successful publishers have realized that revenue retention is a key to growth.  In the May 2021 Media Ad Sales Trends report, boostr found that revenue retention and revenue growth are positively correlated.  In fact, the digital publishers with the highest revenue growth rates from 2019-2020 had the best client and revenue retention rates.  In the same study, boostr found the top 75^th percentile of publishers retained 72% of revenue year over year while the median was 55%.

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Unfortunately, a majority of publishers are not able to retain significant client spend and need to find more new logos every year.  While there are many reasons for this, oftentimes publishers don’t have visibility into the problem.  “When I’m talking to CROs and ask them what their churn is, half of them aren’t sure, the other half often know, but it’s a point in time view because it was so difficult to get the data”, says Patrick O’Leary, CEO & Founder at boostr.

Drawing inspiration from the powerful SAAS metric Net Revenue Retention and working alongside publishers tackling their churn problems, boostr is excited to announce Net Advertising Revenue Retention or NARR.  NARR provides a SAAS play metric for publishers to help them grow by retaining more revenue while improving their enterprise value.  Publishers often trade on their ebitda multiple vs SAAS companies trading on their recurring revenue multiple, at higher valuations.  Publishers who can look more SAAS like are more likely to fetch higher valuations thus growing enterprise value for their stakeholders.

“Revenue retention is critical for publishers and a healthy sign of a strong partnership”, says Tim Daugherty, SVP Revenue & Digital Operations at Vice Media.  “NARR provides publishers a new way to measure how they’re doing and visibility where action is needed.”

NARR is similar to the SAAS metric Net Revenue Retention (NRR) in that it measures how much revenue is retained from a cohort of customers who spent at the same time last year providing a measure of reoccurrence of revenue.  By breaking out NARR by Advertiser, publishers can get insight enabling revenue leaders to take action with an impact.

In addition to introducing the NARR metric to the media industry, boostr is announcing productization of NARR for publishers.  boostr provides a NARR dashboard out of the box so publishers can quickly get insights into their NARR to develop strategies to grow it.  The NARR dashboard is available to boostr clients now.

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