About Chef Simon
For more than 25 years, Chef Simon has established itself as a leading online culinary reference in France, combining recipes, cooking techniques, and contributions from a passionate community.
The platform has built a loyal audience of millions of users while maintaining a strong focus on editorial quality and user experience.
The Challenge
When Chef Simon started working with Opti Digital in late 2024, the objective was clear: rebuild a stronger publisher monetization strategy and accelerate advertising revenue growth.
At the same time, successive Google updates and changing search behaviours were putting significant pressure on organic traffic. For a publisher built around evergreen culinary content, every page view was becoming increasingly valuable.
Chef Simon therefore needed more than a revenue uplift. The challenge was to extract significantly more value from the available audience without relying on excessive ad density, while protecting the site performance and user experience essential to long-term audience value..
Our Solution – A Monetization Strategy Driving ≈5€ Page RPM in France
Chef Simon went live with Opti Digital’s Ad Manager Hub in December 2024, laying the foundation for a monetization strategy that, by 2026, had quadrupled global Page RPM to reach around €5 on average in France, despite traffic pressure.
A Lightweight & High-Performance Wrapper
From the moment Ad Manager Hub’s lightweight wrapper infrastructure was deployed, Chef Simon benefited from faster and more efficient ad delivery compared with standard ad stack benchmarks.
The share of fast ad server calls under two seconds reached 55%, compared with around 13% for standard ad stacks. At the same time, slow calls above four seconds represented just 24%, versus approximately 52% under standard market conditions.
This resulted in ads being delivered approximately 4x faster, increasing the opportunity for impressions to load while still viewable, and supporting a faster, smoother browsing experience.
For Chef Simon, this made ad stack optimization a direct revenue lever: reducing unnecessary latency helped more impressions become viewable and monetizable without adding more advertising pressure.
Increasing the Value of Every Page
With a high-performance foundation in place, Opti Digital continuously looked for ways to create more value from Chef Simon’s existing audience without simply increasing traditional ad density.
A strong example came from the journey to recipes shared by external contributors. Opti Digital identified this high-intent user action as a natural monetization opportunity and redesigned the experience to integrate Rewarded Ads directly before the user continued to the full recipe.
The implementation was developed and tested jointly with Chef Simon to ensure the transition remained seamless. Once live, Rewarded Ads generated +15% overall revenue uplift, with CPMs reaching €60 during early testing.
The strategy then expanded to other high-impact ad formats. Sticky Overlay became one of the strong contributors to Page RPM growth, while Flying Carpet was introduced across selected mobile placements and increased eCPM by +21% on the affected in-content positions.
Optimizing Every Layer Before the Auction
Opti Digital’s analytics tool, Insights Hub, goes beyond auction performance. As an ad revenue analytics platform, it connects user behaviour, page performance, consent and monetization data to identify where value is being lost before inventory even enters the auction.
On Chef Simon’s CMP, analysis showed that the “Accept All” rate was below benchmark. Opti Digital reviewed the consent journey, recommended UX changes and monitored the impact. Within one week, “Accept All” increased by nearly 10%, unlocking a larger share of higher-value monetizable inventory.
The same approach was applied across page layouts and user journeys. For example, when analytics showed that Chef Simon’s Recettes page was generating fewer ad views because users scrolled rapidly toward the content, Opti Digital proposed a redesigned layout to better align content consumption and advertising visibility.
Rather than optimizing only bids, Opti Digital therefore works across the entire revenue funnel — from user behaviour and consent to inventory design, ad viewability, ad experiences, and auction performance.
A Monetization Team, Not Just a Technology Provider
Behind every optimization sits a highly hands-on team.
Opti Digital continuously monitors Chef Simon’s performance, identifies opportunities and turns them into concrete recommendations – whether that means redesigning a page layout, adjusting the consent journey, introducing a new format or testing an additional demand source.
Account Management, AdOps and Tech specialists work directly with the publisher to implement and validate changes, while regular performance reviews ensure Chef Simon understands what is being tested, why, and what impact it delivers.
The result is the expertise of a dedicated monetization team without the operational burden of managing every auction, partner, test and technical issue internally. It also makes continuous ad revenue optimization part of the day-to-day strategy rather than a series of isolated projects.
FAQs
Chef Simon combined faster ad delivery, new high-value ad experiences, consent optimization, page-level analysis and continuous testing. Together, these changes helped quadruple Page RPM to around €5 on average in France by 2026.
Several levers contributed to the result. Rewarded Ads generated a +15% overall revenue uplift, Flying Carpet increased eCPM by +21% on affected mobile in-content placements, and improvements to the CMP increased the “Accept All” rate by nearly 10% within one week.
Instead of simply increasing the number of ads per page, Opti Digital focused on higher-value monetization moments. Rewarded Ads, Sticky Overlay and Flying Carpet were introduced selectively, while analytics helped improve visibility, consent and page layouts.
Chef Simon shows why teams comparing the best SaaS Wrappers for US Enterprise Publishers should look beyond auction functionality alone. Wrapper speed, testing capabilities, analytics, operational control and the ability to protect UX all influence how much value a publisher can generate from existing traffic.
