The NitroPay team spent the first week of January speaking to vendors, potential advertisers, and other publishers at CES. Along with more revenue opportunities for our publishers in the coming months, it was a good chance to talk with industry colleagues about how things are looking in Q1 2023. We wanted to share some of those insights with you.

Ad Rates Down Globally

As we discussed in the last few newsletters, we are experiencing a significant tightening of ad rates going into 2023. After some analysis on our side, it seems like this is primarily impacting two major components: global video CPMs and non-US display CPMs. Some of our vendors are over performing expectations in some areas, but generally speaking, the overall health of our bidders—particularly those listed above—makes it feel particularly rough. 

Overall, 2022 had a fairly abnormal trajectory compared to previous years, with rates flattening significantly in the latter half of the year. Now in 2023, we’re seeing rates similar to where they were in early 2020, prior to the emergence of Covid.

Most of the industry believes that there are a few factors at play, but primarily there is the fear of a recession causing marketing teams to pull back on ad spend, worries about inflation and consumer spending, and a general uncertainty around the global economy. Marketing teams often spend in sync, so if the large players pull back from spending, the overall market does as well.

What Can Publishers Do?

That depends. You could certainly look at adding placements, different sizes, improving viewability, adding video, tackling subscriptions, or adding in the first-party data SDK. All of these are viable options and worth looking into, with some more worthwhile than others. We’re more than happy to chat about things and offer recommendations.

However, if you’ve exhausted the types of placements, viewability metrics, and variety of sizes that you could employ on the site, it may just be a matter of waiting things out until the market improves. We’re already starting to see a gradual increase in CPMs compared to the very start of the month. We expect things to continue to improve at a fairly normal yearly clip with perhaps a larger-than-normal second half of 2023—if the markets return to pre-downturn levels.

That being said, we’re continuing to explore more avenues for generating additional revenue for our publishers in 2023. The technologies coming will ideally be very impactful, so we look forward to working with you.