COVID-19 Revenue Impact

Colm Dolan
January 27, 2021
September 5, 2022
COVID-19 Revenue Impact

Hi There,

First of all we hope you and your family are safe and well.  You are probably all really concerned about the market and how it’s performing, in this article, you will find an update of what we are seeing and what the market is telling us.

From an international perspective, the following is the CPM decreases our ad partners are telling us as of this month;

  • UK – Down 25% YoY
  • US – Down 30% YoY
  • Italy – Down 45% YoY

This information is good to know as we possibly prepare for complete lockdown. My own personal opinion is that markets will bottom out at 40 – 50% cpm drop so its good to prepare for this. On a more positive note, traffic is increasing in verticals such as News and Gaming. We are working with our ad partners to get improved access to the latest global and APAC market data and I will keep you informed of any updates on this.

I do think once the top of the curve is reached in each market that programmatic is in a great space to capitalise on advertisers needing to get their product selling in the market. This could be a couple of weeks or possibly longer. We are hearing that the Chinese market is already seeing a recovery.

Take the Australian market for instance, here is a more detailed look in the attached graph.

YoY CPM drop in Australia for March 2020

Overall, for the month of March so far we are seeing on average a 20% drop in cpm. This is descending downwards from a 5% drop in the first week in March to 35% week ending the 21st.

Overall revenue has had less of an impact bottoming out at 26% revenue drop. We hope this will not be impacted as much with overall online consumption increasing.

Travel has been particularly hit with 60% drops in cpm. News & Lifestyle seem to be generating minimal drops.

Our team is fully focused on anything we can do to limit any impact. We plan on pushing these new technologies into our Fuse platform over the next few months;

  • BlockThrough Ad Block Revenue recovery
  • Inskin rich media ads
  • OpenX Prebid

This will hopefully drive higher auction pressure for ad impressions and counter falling CPMs from other partners. We strongly recommend publishers also look to implement high performing ad units like mobile sticky footer ads with a refresh which are one of the most effective ways to increase revenue from mobile users. If you’re keen to use this format – please let our team know and we will set up from our end?

As anticipated, we’re seeing that direct campaign management is increasingly becoming an avenue of uncertainty. We’re seeing that many advertisers are taking a step back to re-work their budgets and carefully assess their resource allocation. As a result of this, advertisers may request for all live campaigns to be paused until further notice. Whilst your clients rethink their strategy, we’d like to highlight the importance of proactively managing your own time and resource in the campaign management space as we anticipate that the industry will gradually shift their focus towards programmatic.

In addition, the team is currently getting a lot of requests. Please bear with us in answering these questions. I have made myself available to you over the next few months to answer any questions you may have. Feel free to book a call in with me using the link here.

Stay safe,

Colm Dolan, CEO Publift

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