The future outlook for publishers is star-studded, to say the least. While progress may be temporarily slowed, the current coronavirus pandemic can actually help publishers boost their websites and establish themselves as leaders in their sector.
That said, you need to know how to read the patterns in order to ride the wave. Let’s take a look at how coronavirus will impact publishers.
Global Trends
I’m sitting at home due to social distancing and other restrictions that are designed to fight the coronavirus, and this is also the case for billions of people around the world.
Before the global crisis, consumers would spend mornings, evenings, and weekends browsing the internet.
Now, with hundreds of countries implementing strict stay-at-home orders, internet traffic is growing at an unprecedented rate. A lot of attention is going to medical and government sites, but this new wave of users has also increased or maintained traffic for many industries that publishers tend to cover.
At the time of writing this blog, media and news websites alone had experienced a boost of almost 34% in web traffic. Other industries that remained steady or experienced a boost include:
- Social and entertainment – About a 1% reduction
- Films and streaming services – Less than 2% drop
- Gaming – Up 30% for platforms like Twitch
PropellerAds Stats
At PropellerAds, we partner with thousands of quality publishers that serve as a good sample for solid platforms. According to our stats, some of the verticals experiencing a massive boost in traffic include:
- Movie websites +65%
- Free downloads +55%
- Anime +27%
- Content on demand +25%
- Viral content websites +11%
Forecast from Our Head of Traffic Acquisition Anna Efimova
Anna Efimova is the Head of Traffic Acquisition at PropellerAds and she’s been a part of this department for more than 5 years. We’ve touched base with her to gain more insights on what publishers can expect from the coronavirus crisis.
Strategy to Mitigate Negative Consequences
“Some verticals like iGaming are not seeing as much traffic as usual, but we’ve worked hard on making changes, like adapting our feed, to ensure that the fill rates remain near 98%,” said Anna. This will have the same effect as a normal fluctuation and help ensure that our publishers maintain their usual share of traffic.
CPM Rates
A lot of publishers have shown concern over CPM rates. Anna told us that “at the beginning of the crisis, we saw a slight decrease in CPM rates, but that’s already leveled out. Publishers can expect all payouts in full according to their usual schedule.“
Development of the Situation
The global coronavirus crisis kicked off at the beginning of the year, so consumers are now getting used to this reality. The global spread is slowing down and many countries are looking to reinstate their economies.
Anna told us that “we’re not expecting any major changes because most people have already adapted to what’s going on, including advertisers. Many are already looking to kickstart their marketing and they need ads to survive, so publishers should remain unaffected.”
What Should Publishers Do?
When we asked her what publishers should do during the crisis, Anna simply replied “make sure that their websites have the technical capacity to manage the tsunami of traffic coming their way. Publishers also need to update their content more often because consumers are super-focused on new information.”
“Updating content frequently also means that right now is the perfect time for publishers to test out new monetization solutions like in-page push ads because the stakes are lower than usual in terms of page performance.”
Keep Your Website Up-to-Date
The coronavirus is undoubtedly impacting all verticals, but publishers have a huge silver lining in the form of a boost in performance. So it’s a perfect time to test new ideas and improve your organic traffic.
