Why we're publishing demand
· LeadSalesHub
The standard arrangement in lead distribution is that the network knows everything and neither counterparty knows much. Sellers post into the dark. Buyers receive volume without much sense of where it sits against the market. The network sits in the middle with the only complete picture.
That arrangement is defensible right up until you notice how much waste it creates.
The waste is on the seller side first
A generator deciding where to spend media budget is making a bet about demand. Without visibility, that bet is informed by whatever their last conversation with a buyer suggested, which may be months stale. So they generate into verticals that are already saturated, and underproduce the ones with open capacity.
The leads that come back unsold aren't just a loss to the seller. They're a loss to the marketplace — media spend converted into inventory nobody wanted.
The waste is on the buyer side too
Buyers set a price, then discover months later that their endpoint has been rejecting a third of what it received because of a validation rule someone added and forgot about. Or that their capacity cap has been binding since March and they've been quietly missing volume they'd have happily paid for.
None of that is hidden deliberately. It's just that nobody built the screen that would show it.
What we're doing about it
Two things.
Aggregate demand is public. Price ranges and open capacity by vertical and geography, visible without an account. Sellers can decide what to generate before they spend.
Your own numbers are yours. Buyers see their accept and reject rates, their capacity utilisation, and the actual responses their endpoint returned. Sellers see what sold, for how much, and why the rest didn't.
What stays private
Individual buyer pricing. The demand board shows ranges across multiple buyers, and any cell backed by too few buyers is suppressed entirely rather than shown as a range of one.
The point is to let both sides make informed decisions, not to publish anyone's position to their competitors. Those are different things, and the difference matters enough that we'd rather show less data than get it wrong.
The obvious objection
Publishing demand compresses margin. If sellers can see what buyers pay, they negotiate harder.
Probably true at the margin. It's also true that a marketplace where sellers systematically misallocate media spend is smaller than one where they don't, and we'd rather have a clear cut of a larger market than an opaque cut of a smaller one.
We'll find out whether that's right.